EDWIN  TENNEY  BREWSTER 
AND  LILIAN  BREWSTER 


BIOLOGY 
UBRAfcY 


THE  NUTRITION 
OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 


THE  NUTRITION 
OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 


BY 


EDWIN   TENNEY   BREWSTER,  A.M. 

AND 

LILIAN   BREWSTER,  R.N. 


BOSTON    AND    NEW    YORK 
HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN   COMPANY 


1915 


BIOLOGY 

LIBRARY 

G 


COPYRIGHT,    1915,   BY   EDWIN  TENNEY   BREWSTER 
ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED 

Published  April 


"Human  progress  consists  in  the  gradual  and  par- 
tial  substitution  of  science  for  art,  of  the  power  over  na- 
ture acquired  in  youth  by  study,  for  that  which  comes  in 
late  middle  age  as  the  result  of  experience" 

GRAHAM  WALLIS. 


335787 


PREFACE 

THERE  is  nothing  new  in  this  book.  A 
housekeeper  getting  twenty-one  meals 
a  week  with  her  own  hands,  a  householder 
whose  natural  masculine  interest  in  machines 
has  extended  to  the  stoking  of  his  own  bodily 
engine,  have  set  down  so  much  of  the  modern 
theory  of  animal  nutrition  as  they  have  them- 
selves found  it  practically  convenient  to  know. 
We  found  ourselves  asking  various  questions. 
We  turned  to  Lusk  and  Voit  and  Rubner  and 
the  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture 
for  the  answers.  Here,  in  brief,  they  are. 

We  have,  then,  no  new  theory;  we  attempt 
to  persuade  no  one  to  any  course  of  action. 
We  have  simply  boiled  down  the  information 
that  is  in  every  modern  textbook,  and  put  it 
into  form  for  the  non-technical  reader. 

Our  only  apology  for  writing  the  book  at 
all  is  that,  unlike  various  of  our  contempo- 
raries, we  have  not  attempted  to  straddle  be- 


viii  PREFACE 

tween  familiar  words  and  time-honored  ideas 
on  the  one  hand,  and  modern  chemical  phys- 
iology on  the  other;  but  have  frankly  put  the 
new  wine  into  new  bottles  and  let  it  go  at  that. 

The  actual  text  grows  out  of  two  series  of 
short  articles,  one  in  the  Delineator,  the  other 
in  the  Woman  s  Home  Companion,  together 
with  various  sporadic  essays  and  book  reviews 
in  the  Atlantic  Monthly,  the  Metropolitan,  the 
Associated  Sunday  Magazines,  the  Boston  Tran- 
script, and  elsewhere.  But  the  growth  has  been 
quite  beyond  the  parental  ken;  and  except  for 
an  occasional  paragraph,  the  book  is  entirely 
new. 

Our  especial  thanks  are  due  to  Mr.  James 
E.  Tower,  associate  editor  of  the  Delineator, 
for  his  first  suggestion  that  we  should  make 
a  book  and  for  his  expert  advice  on  what  the 
public  wants. 

L.  B. 


CONTENTS 

I.  THE  HUMAN  MACHINE       .....  3 

II.  THE  FALLACY  OF  LIEBIG   .....  10 

III.  WHAT  ALL  THE  WORLD  is  EATING      .  19 

IV.  CERTAIN  PRIVATE  VAGARIES  OF  DIET  25 
V.  THE  MEASURE  OF  HUMAN  WORK  .     .  33 

VI.  THE  LATENT  ENERGY  OF  THE  FOOD  .    42 

VII.  THE  NORMAL  RATION 49 

VIII.  A  THOUSAND  FOOD  UNITS  FOR  A  DIME     57 

IX.  THE  FATS  AND  OILS  IN  THE  BODY     .    66 

X.  THE  STARCH-SUGAR  GROUP   .     .     .     .     75 

XL  OUR  HUMAN  LIFE-STUFF 82 

XII.  THE  PROTEINS  IN  THE  BODY     ...    88 

XIII.  THE  PROTEINS  IN  THE  FOOD      ...    97 

XIV.  SALTS  AND  SAVORS 106 

XV.  THE  BALANCED  DIET 115 

~XVI.  FIGURING  A  DIETARY 123 

XVII.  THE  GROWING  CHILD 131 

XVIII.  OF  CERTAIN  SPECIAL  DIETS       ...  138 

XIX.  THE  CASE  FOR  THE  VEGETARIAN    .     .  146 

XX.  THE  LIMITS  OF  KNOWLEDGE      .     .     .153 


x  CONTENTS 

APPENDIX 159 

DAILY  FOOD  REQUIREMENT  FOR  PERSONS  AT 
LIGHT  WORK  —  RUBNER  STANDARD      .     .  161 

PER  CENT  OF  TOTAL  ENERGY  IN  VARIOUS  DIETS 
DERIVED  FROM  PROTEINS  AND  FROM  FATS  1 62 

TABLES  FOR  ESTIMATING  AND  COMPUTING  THE 

NUTRIENTS  OF  COMMON  FOODS    .     .     .     .162 
INDEX  .  201 


THE  NUTRITION 
OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 


THE    NUTRITION 
OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

I 

THE  HUMAN  MACHINE 

THE  present-day  efforts  of  science  to 
ameliorate  the  condition  of  the  eating 
classes  really  go  back  to  about  1840.  Within 
the  memory  of  women  who  are  still  keeping 
house,  the  learned  world  had  nothing  to  tell 
the  mother  of  a  family  concerning  her  dealings 
with  butcher  and  baker.  If  the  family  cook  fed 
her  household  by  immemorial  tradition  and 
rule  of  thumb,  the  most  scientific  head  of  the 
largest  public  institution  was  no  better  off. 
Chemist,  physiologist,  farmer  with  stock  to 
fatten,  woman  with  human  beings  to  feed,  all 
were  in  the  same  boat.  Nobody  really  knew 
what  food  is  for. 

General  opinion  had  it  that  the  work  of  the 
body  is  not  done  on  its  food.   A  mysterious 


4       NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

"vital  force"  was  supposed  to  animate  the 
body  and  to  move  the  muscles.  Heaven  sup- 
plied us  at  birth  with  enough  to  last  us 
throughout  our  days,  and  every  stroke  of 
work  during  the  longest  life  was  done  on  this 
original  supply.  Each  of  us  was  a  storage 
battery  charged  for  a  lifetime,  a  clock  wound 
up  for  eighty  years.  But  who  wound  the  clock, 
and  just  where  under  our  waistcoats  we  car- 
ried this  enormously  powerful  dry-cell  was 
precisely  "one  of  those  things  that  no  fellah 
can  find  out." 

Nor  was  the  object  of  the  alimentary  intake 
generally  thought  to  be  to  keep  the  body 
warm.  "By  some,"  remarks  a  standard  medi- 
cal work  of  the  eighteen-forties,  this  bodily 
heat  "has  been  regarded  as  the  product  of 
effervescence  of  the  blood  and  humours;  by 
others,  as  owing  to  the  disengagement  of  an 
igneous  matter  or  spirit  from  the  blood;  by 
others  to  an  agitation  of  the  sulphureous  parts 
of  the  blood;  whilst  Boerhaave  and  Douglas 
ascribe  it  to  the  friction  of  the  blood  against 
the  parietes  of  the  vessels,  and  of  the  globules 


THE  HUMAN  MACHINE  5 

against  each  other.  In  favour  of  the  last  hy- 
pothesis - — "  But  one  need  not  go  on.  The 
point  is  that  what  we  now  know  to  be  the  one 
chief  object  and  function  of  all  the  solid  food 
that  we  put  into  our  mouths,  namely,  to  serve 
as  fuel  for  the  bodily  engine  and  drive  the 
human  machine  through  its  day's  work,  had 
hardly  occurred  to  anybody  seventy  years 
ago. 

On  the  other  hand,  mankind  has  known 
from  the  earliest  times,  usually  from  bitter 
experience,  that  whoso  goes  hungry,  grows 
also  weak  and  finally  dies.  But  why  he  weak- 
ens, and  what  he  dies  of,  were  again  a  part  of 
the  unsolved  mystery  of  existence. 

Common  opinion,  however,  came  down  to 
about  this:  Most  things,  left  alone,  fall  into 
decay  and  disappear.  Obviously  that  is  true 
of  the  animal  body  when  once  the  animating 
spark  has  departed  from  it.  How  simple,  then, 
to  suppose  that  this  same  decay  is  going  on  all 
the  while  during  life,  and  that  the  one  and  only 
object  of  roast  and  loaf  is,  as  the  phrase  went, 
"to  restore  the  waste  of  tissue." 


6       NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

In  other  words,  we  leave  the  family  motor- 
car out  in  the  rain  long  enough,  and  it  falls 
apart  into  a  heap  of  mouldy  leather  and  rusty 
steel.  Evidently,  then,  we  feed  the  machine  on 
gasoline  in  order  to  repair  this  wasted  sub- 
stance. The  gasoline  does  not  drive  the 
wheels;  that  is  accomplished  by  mysterious 
and  unknown  "mechanical  force"  which  the 
maker  put  into  the  car  before  it  left  the  shop. 
The  cylinders  grow  hot  merely  by  the  friction 
of  their  pistons.  The  gasoline,  in  some  un- 
known way,  is  transformed  into  rubber  and 
brass  to  replace  the  worn-out  members.  Such 
in  modern  terms  was  the  reasoning  of  the  pre- 
Victorian  physiologists  concerning  the  living 
automobiles  in  which  we  travel  through  our 
day's  work. 

It  would  not  be  worth  while  to  dwell  at  such 
length  on  this  long  exploded  error,  were  it  not 
that  the  same  old  superstition  still  lingers  in 
the  public  mind.  We  know  better.  We  have 
read  the  housekeeping  magazines.  We  have 
studied  physiology  at  school.  Yet  for  some 
reason,  the  old  idea  clings,  that  the  great  ob- 


THE  HUMAN  MACHINE  7 

ject  of  food  is  to  replace  outworn  portions  of 
the  body  —  that  the  food  is  the  duplicate 
parts  and  the  spare  tire  which  the  prudent 
automobilist  carries  along  on  his  seventy-year 
journey  from  cradle  to  grave.  Food  is,  to  be 
sure,  in  part  that;  but  at  least  nineteen- 
twentieths  of  what  we  pay  for  is  actually  used 
simply  as  gasoline  to  drive  the  engine,  not  as 
spare  parts  to  mend  breaks.  So  we,  too  often, 
telephone  to  the  butcher  shop  for  an  expensive 
new  tire,  when  what  we  really  need  is  another 
gallon  of  oil  from  the  bake-shop  or  the  gro- 
cery. 

Any  housekeeper,  therefore,  who  wants  to 
take  advantage,  let  us  say,  of  the  present-day 
work  of  the  United  States  Department  of 
Agriculture  in  its  endeavor  to  counter  on  the 
high  cost  of  living,  and  to  feed  her  family  well 
without  spending  more  than  she  can  afford, 
must  first  of  all  clear  her  mind  of  this  old 
repairing-the-waste-of-tissue  superstition.  Of 
course,  if  we  had  never  eaten  anything,  we 
shouldn't  be  here  now.  But  practically  we 
neither  live  to  eat  nor  eat  to  live:  we  eat  to 


8      NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

work.  For  all  practical  purposes,  a  nutritious 
food  is  one  that  drives  the  bodily  engine.  That 
is  the  one  great  contribution  of  modern  science 
to  household  economy. 

To  be  sure,  three  quarters  of  the  driving 
energy  which  in  very  differing  amounts  is 
locked  up  in  each  pound  of  mutton  chop  or 
watermelon  or  apple  pie,  ready  for  any  one 
with  work  to  do  to  digest  out  and  use,  goes 
simply  to  keeping  us  warm,  to  pumping  our 
blood,  and  to  sucking  air  into  our  lungs.  Only 
a  small  part  of  our  day's  "work"  is  anything 
that  we  can  decently  ask  pay  for  doing.  But 
work  it  all  is  in  the  scientific  sense;  and  any 
food  is  "nutritious"  simply  in  proportion  to 
the  "work"  of  nerve  or  gland  or  muscle  that 
we  can  make  it  do. 

When  all  is  said,  then,  our  bodies  are  simply 
human  motor-cars.  They  are  built  of  flesh  and 
bone  instead  of  steel  and  leather.  They  run  on 
bread  and  butter  instead  of  gasoline.  They 
have  a  million  cylinders  in  place  of  six,  and  the 
least  of  their  parts  is  more  complex  in  its  struc- 
ture than  all  the  automobiles  that  ever  came 


THE  HUMAN  MACHINE  9 

out  of  Detroit.  But,  at  bottom,  they  are  explo- 
sion engines,  which  our  souls,  sitting  at  the 
steering-wheel  under  our  hats,  guide  through 
seventy  years  of  work  —  and  then,  let  us  hope, 
change  for  an  improved  model. 


II 

THE  FALLACY  OF  LIEBIG 

THE  man  who  had  most  to  do  with  break- 
ing through  the  old  doctrine  of  "vital 
force"  was  the  great  Baron  von  Liebig.  Liebig 
picked  up  an  idea  of  Lavoisier  —  which  the 
French  chemist  himself  would  most  probably 
have  worked  out  if  the  reformers  of  his  day 
had  not  cut  off  his  head  during  the  Revolution 
—  the  idea  that  the  heat  of  the  body  comes 
simply  from  the  burning  of  the  food.  Lavoisier 
was  in  the  main  right;  and  even  in  part  proved 
his  case  by  showing  that  the  quantity  of  ice 
which  a  guinea  pig  could  melt  by  the  warmth 
of  its  body  had  a  pretty  close  relation  to  the 
amount  of  carbon  dioxid  which  it  gave  off  from 
its  lungs,  or  in  other  words,  to  the  amount  of 
food  that  it  was  using  up.  Lavoisier,  however, 
supposed  that  this  combustion  takes  place  in 
the  lungs  —  an  opinion  which  still  lingers  in 
the  popular  mind,  and  even  occasionally  finds 
its  way  into  print. 


THE   FALLACY  OF  LIEBIG         n 

Liebig,  then,  starting  with  this  idea  of 
Lavoisier,  was  able  to  prove  what  the  older 
man  of  science  had  only  believed;  and  to  show, 
in  addition,  that  the  combustion  of  the  food 
takes  place,  not  particularly  in  the  lungs,  but 
in  all  the  tissues  of  the  body,  and  most  espe- 
cially in  the  muscles. 

This  done,  it  was  but  a  short  step  to  the 
opinion,  that  not  only  the  heat  of  the  body, 
but  likewise  all  its  work  is  done  by  the  com- 
bustion of  the  food.  Another  step,  equally 
short,  brings  us  to  the  strictly  modern  view 
that  the  food  consumed  in  the  body  yields,  in 
general,  the  same  amount  of  heat  and  work  as 
if  it  had  been  dried  and  burned  under  the 
boiler  of  a  steam  engine  or  exploded  in  the 
cylinder  of  a  motor-car.  The  "nutrition"  of 
food,  then,  is  precisely  the  same  thing  as  the 
nutrition  of  coal  or  gasoline  —  the  ability  to 
get  itself  oxidized  and  to  do  work. 

These  steps  Liebig  took,  about  the  middle  of 
the  century,  and  forthwith  the  entire  scientific 
world  came  trailing  after  him.  His  basal  idea 
has  never  been  questioned  since. 


12    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

At  one  point,  however,  Liebig's  theory, 
thoroughly  sound  in  the  main,  erred  through 
excess  of  logic.  We  human  beings  are  made  up 
largely  of  muscle.  The  muscle  as  it  works  uses 
up  its  substance.  Let  us,  then,  study  the  chem- 
ical nature  of  muscle.  Those  foods  which  are 
most  like  muscle  will  best  replace  the  wasted 
substance  and  be  most  nutritious. 

Therefore,  wrote  Liebig  in  effect,  a  working- 
man  at  hard  labor  should  eat  oat  bread  rather 
than  wheat  because  oats  chance  to  be,  chem- 
ically, slightly  more  like  flesh.  Most  of  all 
should  a  workingman  eat  much  meat,  because 
meat  is  of  all  foods  most  like  the  tissue  of  his 
own  muscles. 

On  the  other  hand,  argued  Liebig,  if  one  is 
to  endure  cold,  he  must  eat  such  foods  as  most 
resemble  the  substances  which  we  actually  do 
use  to  warm  our  houses,  namely,  the  fats, 
sugars,  and  starches.  These  will  burn  up  in 
the  body  and  keep  us  warm,  whether  we  work 
or  rest.  Foods,  therefore,  said  Liebig,  are  of 
two  kinds  —  the  blood-making  or  flesh-build- 
ing foods  which  repair  the  tissue  which  is 


THE  FALLACY  OF  LIEBIG         13 

destroyed  when  we  do  work,  and  the  heat- 
yielding  foods  which  merely  keep  us  warm. 
"Elements  of  Nutrition"  and  "Elements  of 
Respiration"  were  Liebig's  names  for  the  two. 

All  this,  I  say,  was  most  logical.  In  other 
words,  a  motor-car  is  built  of  steel,  leather, 
rubber,  and  wood,  mostly  of  steel.  As  the  car 
is  used,  it  wears  out.  Therefore  the  proper 
fuel  for  a  motor-car  is  something  as  nearly  as 
possible  like  iron.  Evidently  gasoline  is  merely 
a  "fuel-food,"  an  "element  of  respiration," 
good  to  keep  the  feet  warm,  but  no  use  at  all 
to  push  the  load  uphill. 

An  obvious  experiment  knocked  this  Liebig- 
schen  Theorie  higher  than  an  aeroplane.  Voit, 
in  1866,  among  others  who  did  not  agree  with 
Liebig,  simply  took  a  man,  measured  his  food 
or  let  him  go  hungry,  measured  the  muscular 
work  of  nine  hours  a  day  on  a  treadmill,  and 
by  analyzing  the  waste  of  lung  and  kidney 
determined  just  how  much  of  one  was  going 
into  the  other.  It  transpired  forthwith  that 
when  the  subject  of  the  experiment  changed 
from  rest  to  labor,  the  consumption  of  "fuel- 


i4    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

foods"  changed  in  precisely  equal  measure, 
but  the  consumption  to  "tissue-building" 
foods  remained  exactly  the  same.  The  severe 
labor  used  up  fat,  not  muscle. 

In  other  words,  the  man  did  his  work  entirely 
on  his  "elements  of  respiration,"  and  not  at 
all  on  his  "elements  of  nutrition."  That  is  to 
say,  "nutritious"  foods  are  precisely  those 
which  are  not  like  the  living  substance  of  the 
body.  So  even  Liebig  himself  changed  his 
mind.  He  had  taught  the  world  what  "nutri- 
tion" is.  His  mistake  lay  in  applying  his  defi- 
nition to  the  wrong  things. 

As  we  now  know,  of  course,  the  place  where 
the  first  scientific  dietitian  went  wrong  is  this: 
The  working  muscle  does  consume  its  own 
substance.  About  that,  there  is  no  question. 
But  it  does  not  consume  all  parts  of  its  substance 
equally.  We  are  built  of  flesh;  but  we  run  on 
sugar,  precisely  as  the  simpler  engines  of  auto- 
mobile and  motor-boat  are  built  of  steel  and 
run  on  gasoline.  We  continually  use  up  and 
renew  a  substance  of  which  the  body  at  any 
single  moment  contains  very  little;  so  that  like 


THE  FALLACY  OF  LIEBIG         15 

any  other  explosion  engine,  we  use  up  our 
weight  of  fuel  many  times  over  before  we  wear 
out  our  substance  once. 

With  the  proof  of  this  simple  fact  departed 
once  for  all  from  scientific  literature  Liebig's 
rigid  distinction  between  "fuel-foods"  and 
"muscle-formers."  All  proper  foods,  as  we 
now  know,  are  built  into  the  substance  of 
the  body,  and  are  therefore  "tissue-builders." 
All  likewise,  except  water  and  various  salts, 
yield  heat  or  work  indifferently,  and  are  all 
alike,  therefore,  "fuel-foods"  and  "energy- 
producers."  There  is  no  sort  of  foodstuff 
which  forms  muscle,  which  does  not  equally 
form  brain,  nerves,  skin,  bones,  hair,  and  finger 
nails.  In  the  light  of  our  present-day  physi- 
ology, all  these  old  phrases  have  about  as  much 
literal  meaning  as  our  saying  that  the  sun  sets. 

A  curious  paradox  follows  from  this  modern 
scientific  doctrine  of  animal  nutrition.  The 
body  depends  most  for  its  nutriment  on  the 
very  substances  of  which  it  contains  least.  Of 
all  that  we  take  into  our  mouths  —  we  are 
supposed  to  breathe  through  our  noses  —  the 


16    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

most  indispensable  is  water.  It  is  the  chief 
"tissue-builder,"  for  it  makes  up  three  fifths 
of  the  total  weight  of  the  body,  and  the  daily 
intake  is  three  times  that  of  all  other  foods 
combined.  Yet  this  essential  "muscle-maker" 
is  not  in  the  slightest  degree  nutritious.  Not 
one  stroke  of  work  from  cradle  to  grave  does 
any  man  ever  do  on  water. 

Next  to  water  as  "tissue-builders"  come 
the  proteins,  which  build  the  living  proto- 
plasm, and  without  which  there  could  be  no 
body  at  all.  Yet  the  precious  vital  substance 
wastes  at  the  rate  of  only  three  or  four  ounces 
a  day,  and  wastes  equally  slowly  whether  the 
body  works  or  rests. 

Third  in  order,  unless  one  is  over-fat,  come 
the  inorganic  salts  which  form  the  skeleton. 
But  the  bones,  once  formed,  are  permanent, 
and  their  elements  have  no  part  at  all  in  the 
day's  labor. 

Meanwhile  the  great  ruck  of  the  old  "fuel- 
foods,"  principally  of  course  the  starches  and 
sugars,  which  appear  only  in  small  quantity 
in  the  substance  of  the  body,  are  the  real  nu- 


THE  FALLACY  OF  LIEBIG         17 

trients  which  do  nine  tenths  of  the  body's 
work.  They  are  taken  into  the  living  tissue, 
exploded,  thrown  out  again,  and  renewed  al- 
most as  rapidly  as  the  gasoline  vapor  in  the 
cylinder  of  a  motor-car. 

"The  evil  which  men  do  lives  after  them." 
Liebig  was  one  of  the  leading  scientific  men 
of  his  time,  and  he  had  besides  a  popular  fol- 
lowing that  went  even  beyond  his  reputation 
among  his  own  kind.  His  laboratory  at  Gies- 
sen  was  almost  the  center  of  the  chemical 
world,  the  best  teaching  institution  outside 
Paris,  and  the  Mecca  of  all  the  ardent  young 
chemists  of  Christendom.  The  Baron  himself 
was  a  most  forceful  and  inspiring  personality; 
while  his  famous  "extract"  was  as  much  a 
household  word  to  our  parents  as,  let  us  say, 
Postum  is  to  us.  What  wonder,  then,  that  his 
peculiar  views  bit  into  the  popular  mind,  and 
stuck  there  long  after  science  had  abandoned 
them. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  every  one  of  us,  man 
in  the  street,  cooking-school  teacher,  writer 
on  domestic  science,  amateur  adviser  to  the 


1 8    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

public  on  the  care  of  its  health,  has  his  practi- 
cal ideas  concerning  diet  more  or  less  colored 
by  this  quite  erroneous  theory  of  Liebig's. 
It  disappeared  from  all  scientific  works  before 
1880;  but  it  still  haunts  the  minds  of  Dieti- 
tians in  Ordinary  to  the  General  Public  and 
bobs  up  in  the  housekeeping  magazines.  Many 
a  good  dollar  does  it  cost  us  every  year  to 
buy  food  that  Baron  von  Liebig  supposed  to 
be  nutritious  instead  of  that  which  the  United 
States  Department  of  Agriculture  knows  to  be. 


O 


Ill 

WHAT  ALL  THE  WORLD  IS  EATING 

INE  of  the  curious  things  about  human 
diet  is  that  no  matter  what  men  have 
thought  they  believed,  they  have  acted,  al- 
ways and  everywhere,  in  pretty  close  accord 
with  our  modern  scientific  doctrine  of  food 
values.  People  have  maintained  all  sorts  of 
theories,  have  clung  to  all  sorts  of  supersti- 
tions. They  have  held  the  cow  sacred,  ab- 
stained from  pork,  shunned  horseflesh.  They 
have  eaten  black  bread  and  white;  they  have 
lived  on  rice  and  dates,  and  never  eaten  bread 
at  all.  There  are  whole  races  who  never  taste 
meat;  and  whole  races  who  virtually  never  eat 
anything  else.  But  one  and  all,  semper,  ubique, 
omnibus,  they  have  pitched  upon  viands  that 
would  run  a  locomotive  if  dried  out  and  burned 
under  the  boiler. 

This  done,  it  has  not  seemed  to  make  the 
least  difference  what  the  foods  are,  provided 


20    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

only  that  they  are  wholesome  of  their  kind 
and  suitably  cooked.  Our  army  fights  on  a 
daily  ration  containing  a  pound  and  a  quarter 
of  meat.  The  Roman  legionaries,  who  also  did 
some  fighting  in  their  day,  lived  on  grain  fla- 
vored with  lard;  while  even  amid  the  luxury 
of  the  Empire,  the  gladiators  were  still  called 
kordearii,  that  is,  "barley-eaters."  On  the  race 
of  the  allied  armies  to  Pekin,  the  Japanese 
soldiers  fairly  ran  away  from  the  European 
regiments  —  and  on  a  diet  of  boiled  rice  and 
dried  fish. 

A  Yale  team  trains  on  beef  and  mutton. 
The  Greek  athletes,  who  also  were  goodly 
men,  trained  on  barley,  figs,  and  olive  oil.  The 
flesh-eating  American  Indian  has  been  called 
the  original  scarlet  runner.  But  in  the  other 
India,  in  the  old  days  before  the  telegraph,  the 
messenger  service  from  Madras  to  Bombay 
and  Calcutta  was  by  means  of  men  on  foot, 
who  did  sixty-odd  miles  for  a  day's  work,  and 
kept  it  up,  a  thousand  miles  at  a  stretch,  on 
rice.  Potatoes  have  been  the  main  food  of  the 
Irish  for  two  hundred  years  —  and  yet  one 


WHAT  ALL  THE  WORLD  EATS      21 

still  sees  an  occasional  Irish  name  in  the  sport- 
ing column. 

So  it  goes.  Three  meals  of  meat  a  day,  with 
beer,  support  the  eight  hours'  strenuous  toil 
of  the  plumber.  The  New  England  farmer,  a 
generation  ago,  put  in  his  sixteen  hours  a  day 
in  the  hayfield  on  pie,  baked  beans,  and  dough- 
nuts, rarely  eating  meat  at  all  except  when  he 
killed  a  "critter."  In  China,  where  two  acres 
of  ground  supports  a  family  of  five,  and  the  diet 
is  rice,  sweet  potatoes,  beans,  and  garden  stuff, 
a  tea-carrying  coolie  for  a  day's  work,  packs  a 
hundred  and  fifty  pounds  over  forty  miles  of 
road.  The  famous  porters  of  Asia  Minor  walk 
off  with  a  quarter  of  a  ton  on  their  backs,  and 
nothing  but  bread  and  dried  fruit  on  their 
insides.  The  Chilian  miners,  whom  Darwin 
judged  the  strongest  laborers  in  the  world, 
toil  on  boiled  beans  and  bread. 

Nor  does  the  source  of  a  people's  food  seem 
to  make  the  smallest  difference  in  its  mental 
or  moral  qualities.  Our  own  Plains  Indian, 
who  lived  largely  on  meat,  was  fierce  enough. 
The  Mongol  Tartar  made  his  name  the 


22    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

synonym  of  all  that  is  bloodthirsty  and 
cruel. 

".  .  .  Who  can  stand  his  raging  force, 
When  first  he  rides,  then  eats  his  horse?" 

The  nomadic  Huns  were  truly  the  "scourge  of 
God."  Yet  the  Eskimos,  who  also  live  entirely 
on  meat  and  eat  ten  pounds  at  a  meal,  are  the 
most  peaceable  of  mankind,  and  do  not  so 
much  as  strike  with  their  fists.  But  the  Ar- 
menian massacres,  the  Balkan  atrocities,  the 
Russian  pogroms,  are  the  work  of  essential 
vegetarians. 

Most  of  us  believe  that  the  flesh-eating  na- 
tions are  the  leaders  of  civilization,  and  that 
plenty  of  meat  is  the  only  diet  for  efficiency. 
But  the  Abyssinians  and  the  Turkomans,  the 
New  England  Indians  in  colonial  days,  the 
Koreans,  Tibetans,  Hottentots,  Papuans,  Gyp- 
sies, Patagonians,  Maoris,  also  enjoy  a  mixed 
diet  with  plenty  of  strong  meat  —  and  are 
neither  civilized  nor  efficient.  Who  can  say 
whether  the  roast  beef  of  Old  England  or  the 
bannocks  and  the  halesome  parritch  of  the 


WHAT  ALL  THE  WORLD  EATS       23 

Scots  has  builded  the  better  quality  of 
brain? 

It  is  all  exactly  as  one  would  expect  from  a 
glance  at  the  food  of  the  lower  animals.  When 
mighty  hunters  tell  tales  of  escapes  with  the 
skin  of  the  teeth,  it  is  a  toss-up  whether  the 
charging  beast  will  be  a  lion,  a  rhinoceros,  a 
grizzly  bear,  an  elephant,  a  wild  boar,  or  a  bull 
moose.  Yet  the  lion  subsists  on  flesh,  the  rhi- 
noceros and  elephant  eat  straw  like  an  ox,  the 
boar  grubs  for  roots,  the  moose  consumes  leaves 
and  twigs,  and  the  bear  eats  anything  he  can 
get.  They  say  that  even  the  great  cats  keep 
away  from  the  gorilla.  The  gorilla  lives  on 
fruit. 

As  for  the  harmless  necessary  cat,  the  faith- 
ful dog,  the  robin  redbreast  and  most  of  the  lit- 
tle song  birds,  the  gentle  seal,  the  garden  toad, 
the  clam,  and  the  bath  sponge,  are  they  not 
all  alike  carnivores,  who  slay  to  eat?  If  food 
really  counts  as  much  as  is  often  said,  there 
ought  to  be  more  difference  than  there  is  be- 
tween polar  bear  and  grizzly,  wasp  and  bee, 
fruit  bat  and  vampire,  or  the  two  sides  of 


24    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

almost  any  such  pair  that  one  can  manage  to 
think  up.  The  only  obvious  fact  is  that,  save 
for  an  occasional  dog,  the  only  creatures  strong 
enough  to  work  are  eaters  of  hay. 

The  food,  then,  is  only  the  fuel;  and  any 
sort  of  creature  may  be  built  to  eat  anything. 
Efficient  nations  and  strong  men  are  nour- 
ished on  any  kind  of  wholesome  food,  decently 
cooked,  if  only  there  is  enough  of  it.  All  the 
old  staple  foodstuffs,  all  the  established  na- 
tional diets,  are  good.  By  the  proof  of  the  eat- 
ing, they  are  equally  good. 


IV 

CERTAIN  PRIVATE  VAGARIES  OF  DIET 

ALL  the  queer  people  in  Germany,  all  the 
vegetarians,  fruitarians,  and  eaters  of 
uncooked  foods,  all  those  who  sleep  out  of 
doors  or  wear  woolen  all  the  year  round,  all  the 
people,  in  short,  who  are  trying  to  convert  the 
world  to  any  sort  of  private  vagary,  have  their 
eyes  fixed  on  the  annual  Whitsuntide  walking- 
race  from  Dresden  to  Berlin.  This,  by  custom, 
has  become  the  try-out  for  every  uncommon 
mode  of  life. 

The  test  is  by  no  means  ill-chosen.  To  win, 
one  must  cover  a  hundred  and  twenty-five 
miles  in  about  twenty-four  hours,  and  well 
within  forty  hours  to  be  placed  at  all.  Several 
eminent  physicians  and  men  of  science  com- 
monly attend  each  race;  while  the  more  prom- 
ising contestants  are  often  under  observation 
for  a  week  or  two  beforehand  and  a  day  or 
two  after,  so  that  the  results  of  the  test  have 


26    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

a  scientific  standing  that  is  lacking  in  the  or- 
dinary athletic  contest.  Walking,  moreover, 
is  the  least  artificial  of  all  games,  the  one  sport 
that  takes  only  a  sound  body  and  a  stout 
heart. 

The  race  of  1902  is  especially  famous.  The 
winner  was  a  corresponding  clerk,  thirty  years 
of  age,  Karl  Mann  by  name,  who  had  been  tied 
to  his  desk  nine  hours  a  day  and  had  done 
most  of  his  walking  on  Sundays.  He  had  been 
a  vegetarian  for  ten  years,  but  latterly  had 
gone  in  for  raw  foods;  and  for  six  months  be- 
fore the  race  had  eschewed,  not  only  fish,  flesh, 
fowl,  alcohol,  tea,  and  coffee,  but  eggs,  milk, 
cheese,  and  butter  as  well.  His  training  diet 
was  two  meals  a  day  of  crackers,  bread,  mar- 
malade, fruit  juice,  Quaker  oats,  nut  butter, 
and  bromose. 

The  next  five  of  the  thirty-odd  contestants 
were  also  food  cranks,  mostly  eaters  of  nuts; 
and  only  with  the  seventh  man  did  the  con- 
ventional diet  make  its  appearance  at  the 
finish  line,  eight  hours  behind  the  winner. 
The  result,  other  years,  has  been  much  the 


PRIVATE  VAGARIES  OF  DIET        27 

same.  The  members  of  the  Vegetarian  Society 
have  made  it  a  point  to  win,  "for  the  good 


cause." 


The  corresponding  stunt  of  the  British  Isles 
is  to  walk  from  Land's  End  to  John  o'  Groats, 
a  distance  of  some  nine  hundred  and  eight 
miles.  At  latest  accounts,  the  record  for  the 
feat  was  held  by  a  young  workman  named 
Allen,  who  covered  the  distance  in  less  than 
seventeen  days,  and  did  one  hundred  and 
forty  miles  in  the  last  two.  Allen  is  a  man  of 
somewhat  radical  opinions,  who  sleeps  out  of 
doors  under  a  tree,  and  feeds  on  bread,  oat- 
meal, and  vegetables,  with  a  little  fruit. 

To  turn  to  our  own  country,  there  are  the 
men  nurses  from  the  Battle  Creek  Sanitorium, 
all  of  whom  are  vegetarians,  whom  Professor 
Irving  Fisher  matched  against  his  student 
athletes  on  the  conventional  training-table 
diet  in  one  of  the  stock  endurance  tests,  hold- 
ing the  arms  extended  horizontally  at  full 
length.  The  nurses  came  out  distinctly  ahead. 
The  best  of  the  college  boys  was  a  baseball 
player  who  held  out  his  pitching  arm  for  an 


28    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

hour  and  fifty  minutes,  though  few  persons  can 
last  more  than  five.  But  several  of  the  nurses 
went  beyond  the  hour,  while  one  stopped  at 
three  hours  and  twenty  minutes  more  from 
boredom  than  fatigue. 

Not  to  multiply  cases  unduly,  Mr.  Horace 
Fletcher,  who  begins  his  day's  work  at  4  A.M. 
and  eats  nothing  until  noon,  when  he  was  well 
past  the  half-century  of  life,  put  in  a  week 
with  a  Yale  boat  crew  in  training,  and  fairly 
held  his  own  with  the  lads.  Yet  his  diet  was 
cereal,  milk,  and  maple  sugar,  costing  eleven 
cents  a  day.  Mr.  Eustace  Miles,  five  times 
amateur  tennis  champion  of  England  and 
the  world's  foremost  amateur  racquet  player 
of  his  day,  lives  for  the  most  part,  in  training 
and  out,  on  protone  biscuit,  a  peculiar  milk 
product  called  plasmon,  fruit,  and  hovis 
bread. 

In  other  words,  ever  since  the  Reverend 
Sylvester  Graham  narrowly  escaped  being 
mobbed  by  the  butchers,  because  he  per- 
suaded the  public  of  his  day  to  eat  his  bread 
in  place  of  their  meat,  an  increasing  number 


PRIVATE  VAGARIES  OF  DIET        29 

of  men  and  women  in  all  civilized  lands,  for 
reasons  adequate  to  their  minds,  have  been 
breaking  away  more  or  less  completely  from 
the  food  traditions  of  their  kindred,  to  adopt 
the  diets  of  unrelated  peoples,  or  to  consume 
newly  invented  viands  such  as  never  were  on 
sea  or  land. 

Virtually  without  exception,  these  dietetic 
heretics  affirm  that  their  departure  from  or- 
thodoxy has  been  to  their  advantage  both 
in  health  and  efficiency.  Doubtless  they  are 
right.  Mills  is  an  instructor  at  Cambridge. 
Chittenden  and  Fisher  are  at  Yale.  Kellogg 
is  head  of  a  great  sanitorium.  Fletcher  is  a 
successful  business  man  who  for  long  periods 
has  been  under  observation  by  some  of  the 
foremost  physiologists  of  America  and  Eu- 
rope. That  such  men  should  be  mistaken  on 
so  personal  a  matter  is  unthinkable. 

It  is,  therefore,  sheer  superstition,  and  quite 
without  any  basis  of  fact,  to  say,  as  is  often 
said,  that  while  Hindu  and  Eskimo  and  Hot- 
tentot may  manage  to  get  on  with  this,  that, 
and  the  other  barbarous  diet,  we  civilized 


30    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

people  must  have  to  eat  precisely  what  we 
have  been  having,  and  that  the  particular 
things  that  we  happen  to  have  been  buying 
are,  to  quote  a  recent  magazine  article,  "es- 
sential not  only  to  our  well-being  but  to  life 
itself." 

Speaking  somewhat  broadly,  a  man  can 
live  on  any  wholesome  food,  which  he  likes  and 
can  digest,  and  which  has  not  too  much  water 
in  it  for  him  to  get  his  day's  fuel  out  of  three 
or  four  pounds.  From  that,  in  a  few  weeks  or 
months,  he  can  change  to  any  other  like  diet, 
and  do  equally  well  on  it.  Modern  science  and 
immemorial  experience  alike  testify  that  what 
counts  in  a  food  is  its  "fuel  value."  The  most 
that  we  ask  of  our  diet  is  that  it  shall  drive 
the  engine. 

Most  of  us  have,  however,  certain  idiosyn- 
crasies. One  person  cannot  eat  mutton.  An- 
other is  poisoned  by  strawberries.  In  like 
manner,  but  on  a  smaller  scale,  each  of  us 
has  found,  or  has  still  to  seek,  some  dietary 
which,  on  the  whole,  and  while  all  things  con- 
tinue as  they  are,  will  suit  him  better  than 


PRIVATE  VAGARIES  OF  DIET        31 

any  other.  It  may  be  five  meals  a  day,  or  it 
may  be  one.  It  may  be  lean  beef  and  water; 
or  it  may  be  grape  juice  and  almonds.  It  may 
be  the  "American  breakfast"  or  the  "Conti- 
nental." It  may  even  be  precisely  the  things 
that  all  the  family  and  friends  and  neighbors 
have  always  eaten.  For  most  of  us,  it  prob- 
ably is  the  latter,  and  the  difference  is  com- 
monly not  great  anyway. 

No  one  has,  then,  any  special  call  to  argue 
with  anybody  else.  Allen  and  Karl  Mann  out- 
foot  the  meat-eating  walkers,  Eustace  Miles 
and  Horace  Fletcher  accomplish  their  truly 
remarkable  feats,  not  because  walnuts  or 
plasmon  or  bromose  or  lettuce  leaves  are  pe- 
culiar foods,  but  because  each  of  these  men 
has  found  the  special  diet  which,  for  the  time 
being,  happens  to  suit  him.  They  feed  their 
boilers  with  especial  skill.  Naturally,  they  get 
more  work  out  of  their  engines  than  the  men 
who  dump  in  whatever  comes  along. 

It  is,  therefore,  not  a  question  of  this,  that, 
or  the  other  food;  but  of  adjusting  the  food 
to  the  eater  and  the  work.  For  this  reason 


32    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

Sir  Ernest  Shackelton,  whatever  he  may  eat  at 
home,  across  the  South  Polar  Ice  Cap,  guided 
by  the  best  wisdom  of  science  and  experience, 
travels  on  nuts,  lard,  oats,  olive  oil,  wheat 
protein,  sugar,  and  dried  milk. 


THE  MEASURE  OF  HUMAN  WORK 

WHEN  once  it  was  established  that  the 
animal  body  is  a  highly  complicated 
engine  running  on  its  oxidized  food,  it  became 
a  very  pretty  little  problem  to  determine  just 
how  much  work  each  human  machine  is  do- 
ing from  hour  to  hour. 

Early  studies  of  this  sort,  during  the  eight- 
een sixties,  were  made  largely  by  direct  meas- 
urement of  muscular  lift.  In  the  famous 
"Faulhorn  experiment,"  for  example,  two 
young  rebels  against  the  authority  of  Liebig 
climbed  a  six-thousand-foot  peak  on  a  diet 
which,  if  the  Baron  were  right,  should  not 
have  been  the  least  use  to  them.  They  lifted 
a  known  weight  through  a  known  distance; 
and  simple  multiplication  showed  more  than 
twice  as  much  "work"  as  the  "elements  of 
nutrition"  theory  could  account  for. 

From  these  somewhat    crude  beginnings, 


34    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

science  has  advanced  to  Atwater's  great  res- 
piration calorimeter  at  Wesleyan  University,  a 
fair-sized  stateroom,  closed  and  copper-lined, 
with  bed  and  chair  and  table  and  stationary 
bicycle  and  telephone,  in  which  a  man  can  live 
for  a  week,  eating,  sleeping,  reading,  working, 
exercising,  with  every  breath  of  air  and  every 
mouthful  of  food  and  every  degree  of  body 
temperature  accounted  for  down  to  the  half  of 
one  per  cent,  even  to  the  growth  of  nails  and 
hair. 

But  even  without  any  elaborate  apparatus, 
it  is  always  possible  to  find  the  work  being 
done  at  any  moment  simply  by  exhaling  the 
breath  through  lime  water.  The  carbonate 
thus  thrown  down  measures  the  output  of 
carbon  dioxid,  and  this  in  turn  measures  the 
total  combustion.  This  was  Lavoisier's  old 
method  with  which  he  made  his  studies  on  the 
guinea  pig,  in  the  early  days  of  chemistry, 
shortly  after  the  first  discovery  of  oxygen. 
Of  late  years,  it  has  been  used  to  sift  out  the 
particular  amount  of  work  involved  in  most 
of  the  common  acts  of  life. 


THE  MEASURE  OF  HUMAN  WORK    35 

It  would  be  a  simple  matter  to  reckon  the 
human  body-work  thus  determined,  in  horse- 
power, as  we  rate  our  motor-cars,  or  in  kilo- 
watts, as  we  buy  electric  current  for  our 
vacuum  cleaners,  or  in  any  one  of  a  half-dozen 
other  common  units.  Convenience  and  mere 
accident  of  custom  has,  however,  brought  it 
about  that  human  labor  and  the  food  energy 
that  makes  it  possible  are  both  figured  by  the 
so-called  "large  calorie." 

The  dictionaries  will  enlighten  the  inquiring 
mind  as  to  precisely  what  this  unit  is,  and  its 
relation  to  the  watt,  the  horse-power,  and  the 
rest.  Sufficient  it  is  for  our  present  purpose 
to  note  that  one  calorie  per  minute  is  not  far 
from  one  tenth  of  a  horse-power,  and  that  the 
"large  calorie"  of  physiological  chemistry  is 
one  thousand  times  greater  than  the  "small 
calorie"  of  physics  with  which  it  is  wont  to 
be  confused. 

It  has  turned  out,  as  one  might  perhaps  ex- 
pect, that  the  productive  outside  labor  that 
earns  our  daily  bread  is  commonly  very  much 
less  than  half  the  day's  work.  We  employ,  to 


36    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

begin  with,  some  hundred  and  fifty  or  two  hun- 
dred calories  of  energy  to  digest  the  food  which 
makes  any  labor  possible.  The  heart-beat  is 
a  steady  load,  and  although  throughout  the 
summer  the  waste  heat  of  our  labor  commonly 
keeps  us  quite  warm  enough,  we  are  forced,  in 
winter,  to  squander  some  hundreds  of  calories 
more  merely  to  keep  from  shivering.  Even 
nervous  fidgetings,  and  the  aimless  tighten- 
ing of  muscles  which  might  just  as  well  be 
relaxed,  amount  to  a  measurable  quantity 
of  effort. 

One  thing  with  another,  a  150  or  i6o-pound 
man,  flat  on  his  back  in  bed,  will  still  do  some 
1850  calories  of  work  in  24  hours.  If  he  is  up 
and  about  the  house,  or  if  he  motors  back  and 
forth  to  his  office  and  goes  up  and  down  in  the 
elevator,  his  heart  will  have  to  pump  his  blood 
uphill,  he  will  make  many  small  movements, 
and  it  will  not  be  quite  so  easy  for  him  to  keep 
warm.  Altogether,  it  will  cost  him  some  20 
calories  an  hour  more  than  if  he  had  stayed 
in  bed,  or  1550  for  the  16  hours  that  he  keeps 
awake.  Allowing  8  hours  in  bed  as  before, 


THE  MEASURE  OF  HUMAN  WORK    37 

2170  calories  is  the  measure  of  this  very  light 
day's  labor. 

Most  persons,  however,  do  get  some  exer- 
cise. The  result  is  that  the  general  run  of  pro- 
fessional men,  desk  and  office  workers,  watch- 
makers, tailors,  typists,  draughtsmen,  and  the 
like,  who  sit  at  their  work,  score,  on  the  aver- 
age, close  to  2500  calories  for  the  total  day's 
labor. 

Moderate  bodily  toil  that  keeps  a  man  on 
his  feet,  but  into  which  he  does  not  have  to 
put  his  back,  —  the  railway  service,  let  us 
say,  or  the  work  of  a  skilled  mechanic, — 
means  another  500  calories.  Really  hard  work, 
like  farming  or  mining,  means  about  3500. 
The  logging  gangs  in  the  northern  woods  go 
beyond  4000;  while  one  professional  bicycle 
rider,  confined  in  Atwater's  calorimeter,  and 
for  a  single  day,  pushing  himself  to  the  limit 
of  his  trained  endurance,  turned  off  9000 
measured  units.  It  takes  in  the  region  of  500 
an  hour  to  play  a  football  match. 

Little  people  do  less  total  work  than  big 
ones,  but  more  pound  for  pound.  A  child  may 


38    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

do  1000;  a  boy  of  twelve,  1500.  In  general,  a 
woman  of  no  or  120  pounds,  sitting  at  her 
work,  or  "playing  lady,"  will  accomplish  some 
1800  calories.  The  lighter  parts  of  housekeep- 
ing will  require  2000;  full  housekeeping  with 
washing,  scrubbing,  and  making  beds,  2500. 
To  nurse  an  infant  of  five  months  costs  600 
calories  a  day. 

It  is  a  striking  commentary  on  the  accuracy 
of  this  modern  work,  and  the  soundness  of  our 
modern  theory,  that  the  inhabitants  of  Paris 
—  housekeepers  and  workingmen  and  chil- 
dren together  —  take  home  from  the  markets 
every  day  an  average  of  2500  calories  worth  of 
food;  while  the  actual  dietaries  of  farmers, 
from  places  so  distant  and  so  different  as  New 
England,  Italy,  Finland,  and  Mexico,  do  not 
anywhere,  on  the  average,  depart  by  20  calo- 
ries a  day  from  3550. 

The  conditions  of  labor,  however,  affect  de- 
cidedly the  amount  of  "work."  The  trained 
man,  hardened  to  his  task,  may  actually  do 
a  quarter  less  for  the  same  output  than  the 
duffer.  Fatigue,  on  the  other  hand,  may  add  a 


THE  MEASURE  OF  HUMAN  WORK    39 

quarter  to  the  labor,  as  unemployed  muscles 
attempt,  aimlessly  and  inefficiently,  to  help 
out  the  weary  members.  An  overheated  body, 
also,  labors  inefficiently;  and  they  have  found 
in  the  German  army  that  an  ill-fitting  shoe, 
that  hurts  a  soldier's  foot  enough  to  make  him 
limp  only  slightly,  runs  up  the  work  of  covering 
a  mile  to  a  fifth  above  the  proper  level.  Oddly 
enough,  the  work  of  carrying  a  load  in  a  knap- 
sack on  the  shoulders  is  somewhat  less  than 
that  of  toting  the  same  weight  of  fat  under 
the  skin.  But  an  ill-fitting  harness,  that  makes 
the  load  uncomfortable,  runs  up  the  work  like 
an  ill-fitting  shoe.  All  of  which  facts,  the  re- 
sult of  painstaking  scientific  measurement, 
have  no  small  bearing  on  the  practical  conduct 
of  a  working  life. 

Curiously,  too,  it  transpires  that  labor  per- 
formed below  the  natural  speed  of  the  laborer 
actually  takes  more  calories  of  work  to  get  it 
done  than  if  taken  briskly  —  and  this  up  to 
as  much  as  seven  per  cent  of  the  total.  This 
also  has  its  practical  bearing. 

We  have  already  noted  that  mere  aimless 


40    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

fidgeting  is  "work,"  and  this,  it  turns  out,  may 
mount  up  to  a  tenth  of  the  day's  productive 
outlay.  On  the  other  hand,  complete  relaxa- 
tion, such  as  is  practiced  in  the  cult  of  power 
through  repose,  cuts  down  the  body-work  a 
fifth  below  the  level  of  ordinary  rest  in  bed, 
and  drops  it  slightly  below  that  for  sound 
sleep.  A  quiet  worker,  then,  saves  himself 
work. 

By  much  the  same  device,  the  aged  bank 
their  fires  down  to  some  four  fifths  of  their 
mid-life  energy;  and  if  they  are  let  alone,  eat 
to  correspond.  One  thing  with  another,  a  par- 
ticular man  or  woman  may  depart  from  the 
average  by  250  calories  a  day. 

Per  contra,  "brain  work"  is  not  work  at  all, 
in  the  scientific  sense.  The  mental  fag  — 
which,  by  the  way,  some  brain  workers  insist 
that  they  never  feel  —  comes  only  from  bad 
air,  congestion  of  blood  in  the  head,  or  the  dis- 
comfort of  sitting  still.  After  all,  the  whole 
nervous  system  is  only  a  thirtieth  of  the  body, 
while  the  portion  of  it  that  has  even  a  remote 
connection  with  our  thinking  is  not  a  tenth 


THE  MEASURE  OF  HUMAN  WORK    41 

of  this.  So  even  if  the  thin  shell  of  gray  mat- 
ter over  our  left  ears  really  did  do  any  "work," 
an  hour's  thinking  could  hardly  involve  so 
many  calories  of  energy  as  one  good  yawn  at 
the  end.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  all  precise  meas- 
urements agree  that  a  man  swapping  stories 
with  his  feet  on  his  desk  is  doing,  if  anything, 
slightly  more  work  than  when  he  thinks  his 
hardest.  The  concentration  of  mind  keeps  him 
quiet.  So  the  brain  worker  on  a  vacation  al- 
ways does  more  "work"  and  needs  more  food 
than  when  he  is  making  a  living. 

All  of  which  is  exactly  what  we  should  ex- 
pect in  the  light  of  our  modern  doctrine  of  the 
relation  of  the  soul  to  the  body.  None  the  less, 
emotion,  with  its  physical  signs,  its  bounding 
heart,  its  labored  breath,  is  "work"  —  and  far 
more  tiring  work  oftentimes  than  it  looks. 


VI 

THE  LATENT  ENERGY  OF  THE  FOOD 

IF  one  is  to  get  through  two  thousand  calo- 
ries of  work  in  a  day,  he  must,  in  the  long 
run,  get  two  thousand  calories  of  energy  in  his 
daily  food.  Practically,  he  will  have  to  take 
in  slightly  more,  for  no  man's  digestion  is  quite 
perfect,  and  only  a  few  viands  ever  develop 
quite  their  full  indicated  horse-power. 

Rubner's  standard,  given  as  a  table  at  the 
end  of  this  volume,  allows  a  margin  of  safety 
amounting  to  slightly  more  than  one  hundred 
calories  between  human  nature's  daily  food 
as  it  actually  comes  to  the  plate  and  the  en- 
ergy to  be  extracted  from  it.  An  ill-chosen 
boarding-place,  a  wife  who  cannot  cook,  a 
bad  set  of  habits,  a  zeal  which  is  not  in  ac- 
cordance with  knowledge,  may  cost  a  hun- 
dred calories  or  two  additional. 

For  us,  then,  who  work  with  our  heads  and 
hands,  rather  than  with  our  legs  and  backs, 


LATENT  ENERGY  OF  THE  FOOD    43 

2100  to  2700  calories  of  energy  will  have  to  be 
latent  in  the  day's  food. 

Now,  it  so  happens  that  the  so-called  fuel 
values  of  all  known  substances  have  long  ago 
been  measured,  and  all  proved  to  be  precisely 
the  same  whether  the  oxidizing  be  slow  or 
rapid,  inside  the  body  or  out.  The  most  "nu- 
tritious" of  all  things  is  hydrogen  gas,  with  a 
fuel  value  in  the  region  of  16,000  calories  to 
the  pound.  From  this,  the  latent  energies 
drop  down  by  way  of  the  pure  fats  at  4220 
and  hard  coal  at  3500,  through  alcohol  at 
3200  and  sugar  at  1860,  to  water  at  nothing  at 
all.  Between  these  two  limits,  all  known  bodies 
find  their  place. 

Luckily,  however,  virtually  all  actual  food- 
stuffs fall  into  one  of  three  groups:  Either  like 
water  and  table  salt,  they  have  no  fuel  value 
at  all;  or  else  like  all  the  various  fats  and  oils, 
both  vegetable  and  animal,  they  lie  close  to 
4220  calories  to  the  pound;  or  finally,  like  most 
other  things  that  go  into  our  mouths  except 
salt,  water,  and  the  fats  and  oils,  they  develop 
so  close  to  1860  calories  to  the  pound  that  this 


44    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

number  is  commonly  assumed  as  the  fuel  value 
of  them  all. 

All  actual  foods,  then,  of  which  we  com- 
monly eat  enough  to  count,  belong  to  the  zero 
class,  the  1860  class,  the  4220  class,  or  else 
are  a  mixture  of  two  or  more  of  these.  In  a 
rough  way,  one  can  always  estimate  the  fuel 
value  of  any  dish  by  leaving  out  the  water  and 
counting  the  fat  twice. 

Clearly,  then,  no  watery  viand  can  possibly 
be  especially  nutritious.  Tea,  coffee,  beef  ex- 
tract, the  unsweetened  liquids  of  the  soda 
fountain,  have,  at  best,  only  one  part  in  the 
hundred  anything  but  plain  water,  and  even 
this  little  is  non-nutrient.  On  no  number  of 
barrels  of  these  could  anybody  wink  an  eyelash. 
Beef  tea  and  the  various  clear  soups  are  some 
97  per  cent  water.  And  since  the  remaining 
three  per  cent  is  partly  salt  and  nearly  fat  free, 
the  total  nutriment  in  a  pint  of  any  one  of  them 
is  of  the  general  order  of  50  calories.  But  a  thick 
soup,  pea,  for  example,  or  a  clam  chowder,  being 
only  80  or  90  per  cent  water,  may  go  as  high 
as  250  calories  to  the  pint.  By  the  same  token 


LATENT  ENERGY  OF  THE  FOOD    45 

"blue"  milk  is  some  170  calories  to  the  pound; 
but  whole  milk,  by  virtue  of  its  cream,  goes 
to  325 ;  and  cream,  which  is  only  three  quarters 
water,  to  1000.  A  breakfast  food,  made  up 
one  part  from  the  package  and  four  from  the 
faucet  is,  of  course,  worth,  at  most,  the  fifth 
part  of  1860,  or  say,  370.  A  surprisingly  large 
number  of  common  foods,  in  spite  of  appear- 
ances, are  really  of  the  thick-soup-and-break- 
fast-mush  class. 

All  our  gelatin  desserts,  all  our  fresh  vegeta- 
bles, all  our  fruits,  all  our  lean  meats,  white 
fish,  oysters,  lobsters,  eggs,  even  our  potatoes, 
are  three  fourths,  seven  eighths,  and  nine 
tenths  water,  and  therefore,  at  the  best,  can- 
not touch  1000  calories  of  food  value  to  the 
pound. 

Everything,  in  fact,  that  is  eaten  about  as  it 
was  when  alive,  is  bound  to  be  mostly  water, 
else  it  would  not  have  been  fluid  enough  to 
go  on  living.  All  such,  then,  can  be  only  mod- 
erately nutritious.  Their  place  in  the  diet  is, 
in  large  measure,  for  other  reason  than  their 
fuel  value. 


46    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

Foods,  then,  to  which  we  add  much  water 
and  foods  to  which  some  previous  owner  has 
added  water  for  us,  form  together  a  fairly 
well-defined  group  with  an  energy  value  below 
1000  calories  to  the  pound. 

But  a  plant  that  is  three  quarters  water 
during  the  growing  season,  when  it  comes  to 
salting  down  its  gains  for  its  seedlings,  does 
it  dry.  All  seeds,  therefore,  beans,  peas,  len- 
tils, corn,  wheat,  oats,  and  the  rest,  are  an 
eighth  or  a  tenth  water  with  only  a  trace  of  oil. 
They  run,  therefore,  a  little  under  the  1860 
calories  to  the  pound.  So  everything  made 
from  flour,  from  bread  at  1200  calories  to  the 
pound  to  doughnuts  at  2000,  are  in  the  same 
general  class  —  a  little  low  if  they  have  over- 
much water  and  a  little  high  if  they  are  rather 
"short."  Only  the  nuts,  which  lay  up  more 
of  their  treasure  in  the  form  of  oil,  and  the  nut 
meals  and  nut  butters  made  from  them,  run 
up  into  the  three  thousands. 

In  the  same  way,  all  sorts  of  fruits  and 
vegetables  out  of  which  we  and  not  the  plants 
have  taken  most  of  the  water,  all  the  raisins, 


LATENT  ENERGY  OF  THE  FOOD    47 

currants,  figs,  dates,  prunes,  evaporated  ap- 
ples, and  the  like,  run  about  like  the  grains; 
while  most  jellies  and  marmalades,  by  virtue 
of  their  abundant  sugar,  become  a  sort  of  arti- 
ficial dried  fruit. 

The  animals,  however,  unlike  the  plants, 
store  all  their  provision  for  a  rainy  day  as  fat. 
And  since  oil  and  water,  proverbially,  do  not 
mix,  the  fat  is  nearly  enough  dry  to  be  worth 
3500  to  4000  calories  to  the  pound.  The  crea- 
ture mixes  it,  a  streak  of  fat  and  a  streak  of 
lean,  in  such  proportion  that  the  ordinary  run 
of  oily  fishes  and  moderately  fat  meats  and 
poultry  break  just  about  level  with  the  grains 
and  the  dried  fruits. 

Starch  and  sugar  therefore,  without  much 
water  or  oil,  and  muscle  fiber  with  both  water 
and  fat,  are  the  two  great  groups  of  staple 
foods,  one  animal,  the  other  vegetable.  Their 
energy  value  lies  between  1000  and  2000  units 
to  the  pound. 

Above  this  higher  value  lie,  in  general,  only 
those  foods  which  art  and  man's  device  have 
made  oleaginous  and  dry.  Most  cheeses  are 


48    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

just  above  2000.  The  extracted  fats  run  above 
3000.  Only  nuts  and  fat  pork  of  Nature's 
handiwork  in  any  way  rival  man's.  Finally, 
we  come  to  the  pure  fats  like  lard  and  olive 
oil,  wilich,  at  4220  calories  to  the  pound,  are 
the  most  nutritious  substances  which  any 
living  creature  eats,  or  which  can  ever  be  dis- 
covered or  devised. 

In  short,  the  lettuce  leaves  in  a  salad,  at 
85  units  of  work  to  the  pound,  and  the  oil  on 
it,  at  4000  odd,  are  about  the  extreme  nutri- 
tive range  of  our  ordinary  foods,  the  one  hav- 
ing more  than  forty  times  the  latent  energy 
of  the  other.  As  for  the  rest  of  the  thousand 
and  one  things  that  we  eat,  are  they  not  all 
written,  in  brief  at  the  end  of  this  volume, 
and  at  greater  length  in  the  Twenty-eighth 
Bulletin  of  the  Experiment  Stations  of  the 
United  States  Department  of  Agriculture, 
seventy-seven  pages,  price  five  cents! 


A 


VII 

THE  NORMAL  RATION 

STARVING  man,  in  good  flesh  to  start 
with,  kept  warm,  and  doing  light  work, 
consumes  his  own  tissue  at  the  rate  of  fourteen 
and  a  half  calories  per  day  for  each  pound  of 
body  weight.  This,  then,  on  the  face  of  it,  is 
the  irreducible  minimum  below  which  the 
daily  intake  of  foodstuffs  cannot  go. 

One  burns  his  own  flesh,  however,  somewhat 
less  freely  than  the  bodies  of  other  creatures, 
and  more  economically,  so  that  it  takes  some 
ten  or  fifteen  per  cent  more  of  ordinary  food 
than  of  body  stuff  already  digested  and  stowed 
away.  Sixteen  to  sixteen  and  a  half  calories 
of  an  ordinary  mixed  diet  for  each  pound  of 
body  weight  is,  then,  the  practical  limit  for  a 
fair-sized  man  at  light  work.  Little  people 
live  at  higher  pressure  up  to  twenty  calories 
to  the  pound.  Rubner's  allowance,  as  tabu- 
lated at  the  end  of  this  volume,  gives  for  good 


So    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

measure,  seventeen  calories  for  each  of  the 
hundred  and  fifty-four  pounds,  which  for  the 
sake  of  making  it  an  even  seventy  kilograms 
is  commonly  assumed  as  the  weight  of  a  grown 
man.  Unquestionably,  however,  many  per- 
sons, —  conspicuously,  of  course,  the  disciples 
of  Mr.  Horace  Fletcher,  —  do  succeed  in  con- 
ducting the  department  of  the  interior  so  effi- 
ciently as  to  get  well  under  these  figures,  and 
close  to  the  starvation  level. 

Two  thousand  calories,  then,  or  a  few  hun- 
dreds over,  is  the  daily  requirement  of  most 
persons  who  will  read  this  book.  It  is  the  work 
of  a  candle  burning  a  half-pound  of  tallow  a 
day,  or  of  an  alcohol  lamp  consuming  eleven 
ounces  of  spirit.  There  is  a  like  efficiency  in 
a  pound  and  a  quarter  of  candy,  or  three  and 
a  half  pounds  of  lean  meat,  or  two  dozen  eggs, 
or  nine  doughnuts,  or  one  peck  of  turnips, 
or  twenty  quarts  of  beef  tea. 

Actually,  of  course,  we  have  to  combine 
these  and  a  thousand  and  one  other  foodstuffs 
into  a  workable  ration  that  shall,  on  the  whole, 
meet  all  the  requirements  of  the  body  every 


THE  NORMAL  RATION  51 

day,  and  at  the  same  time  be  a  succession  of 
meals  that  a  reasonable  human  being  will  like. 
To  start,  then,  with  the  initial  repast  of  the 
day,  the  standard  "Continental"  breakfast 
figures  out:  — 

Coffee,  with  cream  and  sugar,  say 100  calories 

2  rolls,  2  ounces  each,  at  76  calories  to  the 

ounce 304 

|  ounce  butter,  at  228  calories 114 

Total 518 

Or,  if  one  takes  chocolate  in  place  of  coffee, 
making  it  with  a  half-ounce  of  chocolate  (at 
179  =  90),  a  half-pint  of  milk  (at  320  =  160), 
and  a  half-ounce  of  sugar  (at  117  =  58),  there 
will  be  308  calories  in  place  of  100,  and  the 
entire  breakfast  adds  up  to  720  —  by  no  means 
a  "light"  meal  in  spite  of  its  simplicity. 

A  typical  breakfast  in  a  well-to-do  American 
family  might  run :  — 

1  orange,  grape-fruit,  or  the  like 100  calories 

5  ounces  "breakfast  food,"  with  cream  and 

sugar 100 

2  eggs,  2  ounces  each,  at  45 180 

I  slice  of  bread,  2  ounces,  at  76 152 

J  ounce  of  butter  at  228 57 

I  large  cup  of  coffee,  with  sugar  and  cream.  .  100 

Total 689 


52    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

Naturally,  one  can  only  guess  at  the  pre- 
cise amounts  of  each  dish  which  our  hypo- 
thetical American  business  man  would  eat. 
Apparently,  however,  he  gets  no  more  real 
nutriment  out  of  his  somewhat  elaborate 
three-course  meal  than  Tartarin  de  Tarascon 
Sancho  Panga  out  of  his  chocolate  and  rolls 
sitting  up  in  bed. 

As  for  Mark  Twain's  "simple  breakfast " 
that  began  with  "a  mighty  porter-house  steak 
an  inch  and  a  half  thick,  .  .  .  enriched  with 
melting  bits  of  butter  .  .  .  archipelagoed  with 
mushrooms,"  and  ending  with  buckwheat 
cakes  and  maple  syrup,  —  or  any  other  meal 
that  anybody  can  weigh  and  eat,  —  it  is 
merely  a  question  of  looking  out  the  items  in 
the  table  and  adding  them  up. 

Or,  by  way  of  variety,  take  the  following 
actual  meals  of  an  actual  family,  camping,  and 
eating  various  extraordinary  combinations  to 
save  work  for  the  cook  —  and  incidentally 
making  it  easy  for  the  dietitian.  There  were 
three  adults  and  three  children  in  the  group, 
and  their  combined  light-work  ration  accord- 


THE  NORMAL  RATION  53 

ing  to  Rubner's  standard  for  their  body  weights 
figures  9850  calories  for  the  day,  or  1640 
apiece:  — 

First  dinner 

Bread,  I  pound,  9}  ounces 1937  calories 

Butter,  2  ounces 450 

Doughnuts^  6  ounces 750 

Cheese,  3  ounces 366 

Sugar,  3  ounces 348 

Milk,  I  quart 650 

Total 4501 

Or  for  each  person. 750 

The  sugar  and  milk  were  for  coffee,  which 
is  itself  not  worth  counting. 

Second  dinner 

Bread,  I  pound,  7  ounces 1747  calories 

Asparagus,  I  pound,  4  ounces 250 

served  on  the  bread,  toasted,  with  a  sauce 

made  of 

Flour,  2|  ounces 255 

Butter,  2^  ounces 562 

For  dessert,  strawberry  short  cake 

Strawberries,  I  pound,  2  ounces 200 

Sponge  cake,  I  pound 1795 

Thin  cream,  £  pint 600 

Total 54°9 

For  each  person 901 


54    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

Third  dinner 

Beef  tongue,  I  pound 740  calories 

Bread,  8  ounces 608 

Spinach,  3  pounds,  13  ounces 421 

Olive  oil,  eaten  on  the  spinach,  2  ounces ....  527 

Potatoes,  I  pound,  7  ounces 553 

"  creamed  "  with 

Butter,  I  ounce 225 

Flour,  2  ounces 206 

Milk  (skimmed)  I  pint 170 

For  dessert  — 

Cookies,  3  ounces 357 

Coffee  jelly,  only  the  sugar  reckoned,  6 

ounces 696 

Total 4603 

For  each  person 767 

If  we  allow  this  family  only  the  Continental 
breakfast,  with  milk  for  the  children  instead 
of  coffee,  that  meal  will  take  care  of,  let  us 
say,  550  calories.  The  mean  of  the  three  meals 
here  figured  is  825.  This  makes  1375  out  of  the 
theoretic  1640,  with  another  meal  still  to  come. 
Evidently,  this  particular  household  is  in  no 
danger  of  being  underfed. 

It  is,  then,  a  very  simple  matter  for  any 
single  eater,  armed  with  a  letter  scale  and 
the  ordinary  tables,  to  reckon  his  daily  intake 
with  an  accuracy  quite  sufficient  for  all  prac- 


THE  NORMAL  RATION  55 

tical  purposes.  A  cook,  keeping  track  of  the 
raw  materials  that  go  into  the  meal,  and  sub- 
tracting out  whatever  remains  uneaten,  can 
with  even  greater  ease  compute  the  entire 
family  ration.  Even  simpler,  for  many  pur- 
poses, is  it  to  figure  the  supplies  for  a  week  or 
a  month  as  they  come  in,  and  from  these  de- 
termine the  daily  average.  In  like  manner  may 
be  figured  the  fuel  value  of  any  standard  por- 
tion or  any  special  recipe. 

Practically,  however,  outside  an  institution, 
it  does  not  pay  to  do  this  very  often.  In 
the  long  run,  the  individual  man  or  woman 
must  eat  by  judgment  and  appetite.  The  real 
object  of  an  occasional  determination  is  to 
train  the  judgment  and  to  measure  the  appe- 
tite against  a  fixed  and  impersonal  standard. 

If,  then,  one  turns  out  to  be  eating  too  little, 
it  is  a  simple  matter  to  lean  a  little  harder  on 
the  more  nutritious  viands,  and  so  to  cheat 
the  appetite  by  increasing  the  total  intake 
without  augmenting  the  bulk.  Per  contra, 
if  one  is  eating  too  much,  he  has  but  to  let 
up  on  the  nutritious  things  that  he  does  not 


56    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

especially  care  for,  and  to  make  it  up  with  the 
innutritions  things  that  he  likes.  If  by  any 
chance  anybody  should  turn  out  to  be  right, 
he  may  follow  his  likings  with  a  quiet  mind. 


VIII 

A  THOUSAND  FOOD  UNITS  FOR  A  DIME 
ATER  is  properly  worth  about  five 


w 


cents  a  ton.  That  is  what  we  pay  for 
it  out  of  the  faucet.  Some  of  us,  besides,  for 
the  sake  of  sundry  teaspoonfuls  of  ether,  alco- 
hol, potassium  tartrate,  and  tannic  acid,  to  be 
had  along  with  it,  buy  water  by  the  nominal 
quart,  and  pay  a  dollar  a  pint.  We  buy  water 
with  our  milk,  at  four  cents  a  pound;  and  we 
buy  it  also  with  most  of  our  solid  foods  at  all 
prices  from  a  cent  or  two  a  pound,  up. 

Now  there  is  no  reason  known  to  science  or 
to  economics  why  anybody  who  can  afford  it 
should  not  pay  any  price  he  likes  for  his  water, 
for  the  sake  of  what  he  gets  along  with  it  and 
cannot  get  dry.  One  does  not  begrudge  the 
onion  in  his  chowder  even  if  it  is  eighty-seven 
per  cent  plain  H2O,  nor  the  faintly  nutri- 
tious soup  that  tunes  up  the  digestive  ma- 
chinery for  the  meal  that  follows  it.  Only  one 


58    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

may  do  well  to  buy  his  water  with  his  eyes 
open. 

And  as  we  can  pay  all  kinds  of  a  price  for 
water,  which  is,  after  all,  plain  water  and  noth- 
ing else,  so,  too,  can  we  pay  all  kinds  of  a  price 
for  the  fundamental  nutrients  of  our  food. 
The  beef  fat  that  comes  with  a  porter-house 
steak  is  precisely  the  same  thing  that  we  buy 
as  suet  —  though  the  price  is  not.  Fish  oil  is 
fish  oil,  whether  in  salmon  out  of  season,  or 
mackerel  in.  Lean  muscle  is  just  lean  muscle, 
whether  in  terrapin,  scallop,  lobster,  quail, 
brook  trout,  haddock,  or  beef  shin.  Hothouse 
grapes  and  dried  prunes,  cabbage  and  aspara- 
gus, fruit  cake  and  common  crackers,  all  reach 
the  blood-stream  in  the  same  form,  and  the 
working  muscle  treats  them  all  alike.  The 
difference  in  the  cost  is  altogether  in  the  acci- 
dents; and  in  general,  the  more  any  foodstuff 
brings  in  the  market,  the  less  is  it  really  worth. 

Whoso,  then,  has  a  champagne-and-lobster 
income,  let  him  eat,  drink,  and  be  merry  until 
he  finds  something  more  worth  while.  Whoso 
has  not,  let  him  not  think  to  waste  away  for 


MANY  FOOD  UNITS  FOR  A  DIME    59 

lack  —  not  while  there  are  beer  and  crackers. 
The  beer  will  do  him  just  as  little  good;  the 
crackers  are  good  for  five  times  as  much 
achievement.  To  say  that  living  is  expensive 
is  merely  to  say  that  one's  wife  cannot  cook. 

Common  impression  is  that  vegetable  prod- 
ucts are  much  lower-priced  than  animal. 
This  is  by  no  means  the  fact.  Cottolene  and 
crisco  are  not  cheaper  than  tallow  and  lard. 
Good  olive  oil  is  quite  as  dear  as  good  butter. 
Green  peas,  out  of  season,  fairly  rival  the 
salmon  that  goes  with  them.  Mushrooms  at  a 
dollar  a  pound,  each  pound  good  for  only  two 
hundred  calories  of  work,  and  precious  little 
even  of  that  ever  extracted  by  the  human  di- 
gestive machinery,  is  probably  the  high-water 
mark  of  a  useless  food.  In  spite  of  wicked 
meat  trusts,  the  cheaper  animal  fats  are  still 
among  the  least  expensive  sources  of  human 
energy. 

The  special  economy  of  a  vegetable  diet 
comes  in  a  few  great  staples.  Potatoes  at  a 
dollar  a  bushel  make  the  thousand  food  units 
cost  about  six  cents.  Corn  meal  at  four  cents 


60    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

a  pound  drops  the  price  below  three.  Flour 
at  five  or  six  dollars  a  barrel  breaks  just  about 
even  with  corn  meal.  All  the  staple  grains,  in 
short,  that  go  to  make  the  staff  of  life  in  any 
form,  give  a  moderate  day's  work  for  a  nickel. 

One  could,  then,  even  in  these  days  of  high 
prices,  live  on  a  dollar  a  week.  Flour  for  bread 
and  cheap  meat,  glucose  and  cane  sugar,  oleo- 
margarine and  peanut  butter,  lard,  salt  pork, 
and  beef  suet,  dried  peas,  beans  and  lentils, 
oatmeal,  prunes,  sugar,  are  all  to  be  bought 
in  any  city  at  any  time  for  five  cents  a  thou- 
sand food  units;  some  of  them,  at  some  times, 
for  as  little  as  two. 

With  half  the  day's  intake  below  five  cents 
a  thousand  calories,  the  other  half  can  go  up 
toward  ten  and  still  keep  the  total  cost  within 
the  dollar  a  week.  All  moderately  fat  cuts  of 
all  kinds  of  meats  yield  a  thousand  food  units 
for  a  dime  at  all  prices  up  to  fifteen  cents  a 
pound,  excluding  bone  and  other  refuse.  Most 
nuts,  bought  shell  and  all,  do  the  same.  So, 
in  general,  do  all  dried  fruits. 

For  uncommonly  fat  meat  —  pork  chops, 


MANY  FOOD  UNITS  FOR  A  DIME    61 

ham,  most  bacon,  sausages,  much  corned  beef 
—  and  also  for  most  sorts  of  cheese,  one  can 
pay  up  to  twenty  cents  a  pound  and  still  be 
within  the  stint.  The  limiting  price  for  butter 
is  thirty-six  cents  a  pound;  for  olive  oil,  eighty- 
five  cents  a  quart;  for  potatoes,  one  dollar  and 
sixty-five  cents  a  bushel;  for  apples,  big  ones, 
a  cent  apiece. 

In  other  words,  the  necessities  of  life  cost 
five  cents  a  thousand  calories  or  less;  the  com- 
forts of  life  lie  within  ten;  and  only  the  luxuries 
rise  to  fifteen  and  twenty. 

Among  these  luxuries  are  lean  chuck  steak 
at  any  price  over  five  cents  a  pound,  shin  bone 
at  anything  over  three,  beef  liver  anywhere 
above  six.  To  yield  a  thousand  food  units  for 
a  dime,  pigs'  feet  ought  to  bring  less  than  four 
cents  a  pound,  salt  codfish  about  three  cents, 
fresh  haddock  about  a  cent  and  a  half.  Eggs 
are  a  luxury  above  ten  cents  a  dozen,  milk 
above  six  and  a  half  cents  a  quart.  Only  the 
rich  and  the  improvident  can  afford  to  pay 
more  than  about  a  cent  and  a  half  a  pound  for 
carrots,  turnips,  cabbages,  and  squash.  If  beer 


62    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

is  "liquid  bread,"  it  is  very  liquid,  indeed,  for 
it  takes  a  strong  half-gallon  of  it  to  match  the 
nutriment  in  a  five-cent  loaf. 

Rich  or  poor,  nevertheless,  we  can  always 
afford  to  pay  twice  as  much  for  shad  and  mack- 
erel as  for  haddock  and  hake,  and  four  times  as 
much  for  salmon.  Fowl  is  actually  worth  twice 
the  price  of  spring  chicken,  though  we  do  not 
have  to  pay  it;  turkey  is  equally  cheap  at  three 
times  the  cost,  goose  at  five  times.  Almonds 
match  walnuts  two  for  one.  We  get  seven 
times  as  much  for  our  money  in  the  yolk  of  an 
egg  as  in  the  white. 

All  this  presupposes  somebody  who  can  cook, 
and  somebody  to  wash  up  the  dishes  after- 
wards. Ready-to-eat  foods,  a  thousand  calo- 
ries for  a  dime,  are  rarer  birds.  Bread  and  but- 
ter will  do  the  trick,  or  crackers  and  cheese,  or 
either  one  with  milk.  For  years  —  no  doubt 
they  do  it  now  —  the  Massachusetts  General 
Hospital  had  a  lunch  for  the  throng  of  out- 
patients waiting  at  its  clinics  and  for  the  nurses 
and  doctors  on  duty,  two  pilot  crackers,  two 
ounces  of  cheese,  and  a  glass  of  milk,  for  five 


MANY  FOOD  UNITS  FOR  A  DIME    63 

cents.  The  crackers  made  400  calories,  the 
cheese  300,  the  milk  100;  800  for  the  whole. 
In  small  quantities  it  should  have  cost  seven 
cents,  which  is  just  inside  the  limit. 

Virtually  any  kind  of  cracker,  any  kind  of 
cake,  any  kind  of  cookie,  any  sort  of  candy, 
eaten  out  of  a  paper  bag  is  a  safe  shot  up  to 
fifteen  cents  a  pound,  while  several  different 
sorts  are  good  buying  up  to  twenty.  Shredded 
wheat  "clothes-brushes,"  and  all  the  host  of 
breakfast  foods  that  are  eaten  as  they  come 
from  the  package,  cost  just  about  a  cent  an 
ounce  and  are  worth  just  about  a  hundred 
calories  a  cent's  worth.  Doughnuts  can  com- 
monly be  bought  to  yield  a  thousand  energy 
units  for  five  cents.  Dates,  figs,  and  raisins, 
marmalade  and  various  jellies  become  luxu- 
ries only  when  they  cost  more  than  fifteen 
cents  a  pound. 

If,  however,  in  addition  to  paying  for  the 
raw  foodstuffs  and  their  cooking,  the  eater  is 
to  add  the  cost  of  service,  and  any  sort  of  clean 
and  decent  surroundings,  he  cannot  possibly 
keep  his  operating  cost  down  to  anything  like 


64    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

ten  cents  a  thousand  calories.  At  good,  low- 
priced  restaurants,  for  example,  the  standard 
five-cent  cut  of  apple  pie  yields  only  about 
three  hundred  calories;  while  even  a  fifteen- 
cent  plate  of  pork  and  beans,  with  bread  and 
butter  thrown  in,  is  well  under  the  thousand. 
Ham  sandwiches,  corned-beef  hash,  beef  stew, 
and  the  like,  yield  a  thousand  calories  for  about 
thirty  cents.  A  club  sandwich  at  a  quarter  does 
it  for  sixty.  A  lettuce  and  tomato  salad,  cost- 
ing twenty  cents,  makes  the  thousand  calories 
cost  $3.85.  No  wonder  the  young  people  are 
being  driven  into  matrimony! 

But  we  need  not  pile  up  detail.  Whoever, 
whether  housekeeper  or  "mealer,"  is  inter- 
ested to  distinguish  the  substance  of  food 
from  the  shadow,  has  only  to  take  up  any  ordi- 
nary table  of  food  values,  and  in  the  columns 
giving  the  energy  content,  to  imagine  the 
decimal  point  shifted  two  places  to  the  right. 
The  figures  will  then  read  the  number  of  cents 
per  pound  at  which  each  foodstuff  will  provide 
a  thousand  units  of  nutrition  for  one  dime. 
Smoked  herring,  for  instance,  is  rated  at  1350 


MANY  FOOD  UNITS  FOR  A  DIME    65 

calories  to  the  pound.  At  13^  cents  a  pound, 
therefore,  it  gives  its  thousand  calories  for 
a  dime.  Sirloin  steak,  1130,  does  the  same 
when  bought,  for  UTO  cents  a  pound  —  if  it 
ever  is.  At  22^  cents  a  pound,  the  thousand 
food  units  of  sirloin  steak  would  cost  twenty 
cents.  Thirty-four  cents  a  pound  is  thirty 
cents  a  thousand  calories.  Granulated  sugar 
lists  1860.  It  remains,  therefore,  an  economical 
food  up  to  i8f  cents  a  pound.  At  9^  cents,  it 
would  give  a  thousand  calories  for  five  cents. 
At  actual  market  prices,  it  commonly  fur- 
nishes its  thousand  calories  for  less  than  three. 


A 


IX 

THE  FATS  AND  OILS  IN  THE  BODY 
LL  fuels  are  closely  related.    Coal  and 


peat  are  only  preserved  wood.  Wood, 
in  turn,  —  a  nutrient  for  various  other  animals 
though  we  lack  the  machinery  to  digest  it,  — 
is  almost  the  same  thing,  chemically,  as  starch 
and  sugar.  But  sugar  is  chemically  an  alcohol; 
and  the  simple  processes  of  fermentation  with 
yeast  alters  it  into  the  ordinary  ethyl  alcohol 
—  by  no  means  an  uncommon  fuel  both  out- 
side the  body  and  in.  Ethyl  alcohol,  however, 
is  only  the  hydroxid  of  the  second  member 
of  a  series  of  hydrocarbons,  which  we  know  in 
common  life  as  natural  gas,  gasoline,  benzine, 
and  naphtha,  at  one  end  of  the  line,  up,  byway 
of  kerosene,  to  vaseline,  axle  grease,  and  paraf- 
fin candles  at  the  other.  Even  ether,  acetylene, 
and  chloroform  are  cousins  of  this  family  of 
inflammables. 
Parallel  with  the  paraffin  series  runs  a  series 


THE  FATS  AND  OILS  IN  THE  BODY  67 

of  fatty  acids.  The  lowest  member,  corre- 
sponding to  marsh  gas  and  wood  alcohol,  is  the 
acid  of  vinegar,  into  which  another  simple  fer- 
mentation changes  the  alcohol  of  cider  and 
wine.  Higher  in  the  line,  at  the  level  of  kero- 
sene and  vaseline,  come  the  acids  whose  sodium 
salts  are  the  better  sort  of  hard  soaps,  and 
whose  glyceryl  salts  are  the  ordinary  fats. 

In  brief,  wood  alcohol,  natural  gas,  and  acetic 
acid  have  for  their  radical  CH3.  Grain  alcohol 
is  C2H5O  H.  The  fruit  acids  are  built  around 
C2H5  and  C3H7.  The  sugars  are  complex  al- 
cohols with  either  a  C6  or  a  C12.  Starch  and 
wood  fiber  are  a  more  elaborated  sugar.  Coal 
is  compressed  wood  partly  resolved  back  into 
natural  gas  and  rock  oil.  The  fats  are  the 
CaH5  esters  of  the  acids  of  Ci5H31  and  Ci7H35, 
with  sundry  other  numbers  thrown  in,  down 
to  the  eight  per  cent  of  the  CsH7  fat  in  butter. 

In  other  words,  this  small  group  of  first 
and  second  cousins  among  chemical  substances 
furnishes  virtually  all  the  power  that  drives 
all  the  machinery  of  the  world  and  does  all  its 
work,  except  that  which  is  done  by  windmills 


68    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

and  water  power.  Ocean  greyhound  and 
puppy,  locomotive  and  engineer,  are  machines 
which  burn  about  the  same  sort  of  fuel. 

They  used  to  tell  us  in  earlier  days  of  physi- 
ology that  the  digestion  of  the  fats  and  oils 
involves  only  a  division  into  fine  particles 
to  form  an  emulsion  after  the  pattern  of  cod 
liver  oil  and  cream.  Unfortunately,  this  simple 
account  has  turned  out  not  to  correspond  with 
the  facts.  A  ferment  or  "enzyme,"  lipase, 
splits  the  fats  into  the  glyceryl  and  the  fatty 
acids.  The  glyceryl  takes  on  the  elements  of 
water  and  becomes  common  glycerine.  The 
fatty  acids  may  sometimes  even  hitch  up  with 
the  sodium  carbonate  of  the  blood  to  make 
an  ordinary  soap. 

The  glycerine  and  the  cousins  of  vinegar 
acid,  being  soluble,  pass  through  the  walls  of 
the  digestive  tube;  and  then,  once  more  re- 
united, appear  as  the  fat  of  the  blood.  Appar- 
ently, the  same  splitting  into  acid  and  gly- 
cerine enables  the  fat  of  the  blood  to  pass  into 
the  various  tissues. 

If  the  tissue  that  absorbs  the  fat  is  working 


THE  FATS  AND  OILS  IN  THE  BODY    69 

muscle,  this  promptly  burns  it  up  for  another 
stroke  of  work.  Other  tissues,  which  are  not 
working,  may  simply  fill  up  with  fat,  until  the 
living  protoplasm  of  the  cells  is  no  more  than 
a  thin  film  over  a  great  drop  of  oil.  A  mem- 
brane as  thin  as  a  sheet  of  paper  may  thicken 
to  an  inch  through.  Then  our  waists  depart, 
and  the  place  thereof  knoweth  them  no  more; 
or  some  vital  organ  undergoes  fatty  degenera- 
tion, and  the  probate  court  takes  charge  of 
our  mortal  remains. 

One  of  the  curious  things  about  fat  is  that 
the  living  body  is  able  to  make  it  out  of  any 
sort  of  foodstuff.  "The  friendly  cow,  all  red 
and  white,"  that  furnished  cream  for  R.  L.  S.'s 
apple  tart,  used  grass  as  a  raw  material.  The 
grass  in  its  turn,  when  it  went  to  seed  and 
wanted  to  lay  down  food  for  its  own  offspring, 
made  its  fat  —  very  little,  to  be  sure  —  out 
of  soil  and  air.  So  also,  of  course,  do  the  va- 
rious grains;  more  conspicuously  the  olive;  and 
most  conspicuously  of  all,  the  nuts,  which  are 
the  hereditary  plutocracy  of  the  vegetable 
world,  laying  up  treasure  for  their  seedlings 


70    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

in  the  form  of  oils  up  to  half  and  two  thirds 
their  total  weight. 

The  arrangement  is  distinctly  well  planned. 
Fat  being  more  than  twice  as  nutritious,weight 
for  weight,  than  any  other  foodstuff ,  it  is  the  one 
obvious  form  in  which  to  store  large  amounts 
of  energy  in  small  bulk.  A  starving  creature, 
living  on  its  muscle,  wastes  away  eleven  and 
one  half  times  as  rapidly  as  when  living  on  its 
fat.  Professional  fasters,  in  good  flesh  at  the 
beginning,  go  thirty,  forty,  and  even  fifty  days 
without  food,  ninety-eight  days  being  the  rec- 
ord for  a  dog.  In  fact,  for  a  man  resting  or  at 
light  work,  a  mere  half-pound  of  body  fat  a  day 
is  sufficient  to  keep  the  machine  running.  Such 
a  concentrated  nutriment,  manufactured  out 
of  any  sort  of  foodstuff  that  happens  to  be  on 
hand,  is  an  ideal  device  for  storing  up  super- 
abundant viands  against  a  rainy  day,  and  all 
the  higher  animals  from  the  fishes  up,  have 
adopted  the  idea.  But  the  plants,  which  do 
not  move  about,  and  therefore  have  no  such 
need  to  save  weight,  use  starch  for  their  stor- 
age material,  except  occasionally  in  their  seeds 


THE  FATS  AND  OILS  IN  THE  BODY    71 

and  fruits.  Flour  and  potatoes  are,  therefore, 
starchy,  while  meat  and  eggs  are  fat. 

There  is,  then,  no  such  thing  as  a  "fatten- 
ing food."  We  keep  on  hand  about  one  day's 
supply  of  nutritive  cash,  holding  it  ready  for 
use  in  liver,  blood,  or  muscle.  All  else,  over 
and  above  our  daily  needs,  no  matter  what  its 
source,  we  convert  into  fat,  and  salt  down 
under  the  skin  and  in  all  the  out-of-the-way 
corners  of  the  body;  and  after  these  are  filled, 
in  places  that  are  neither  out-of-the-way  nor 
corners.  Any  food  is,  therefore,  "fattening" 
just  in  proportion  as  it  is  nutritious.  The  rep- 
utation of  bread,  potatoes,  and  the  like  rests 
simply  on  the  fact  that,  since  they  have  no 
marked  flavor,  we  eat  more  of  them  than  we 
realize.  Candy  and  other  sweets,  we  simply 
add  to  a  diet  already  ample.  Beer,  though  we 
think  of  it  only  as  a  drink,  carries,  neverthe- 
less, some  five  hundred  food  units  to  the  quart. 

On  the  other  hand,  fat  seems  never,  under 
normal  conditions,  to  be  altered  into  anything 
else.  The  fat  of  each  meal  passes  into  the  blood. 
Part  or  all  of  it  is  promptly  taken  up  by  the 


72    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

muscles  and  consumed.  The  rest,  when  there 
is  any  remainder,  goes  into  storage.  Whenever 
there  is  a  call  on  the  reserves  —  and  this  may 
happen  toward  the  end  of  even  a  single  day  of 
uncommonly  hard  work  —  the  fat  returns  to 
the  blood-stream,  and  the  working  muscle  takes 
it  up  as  if  it  were  fresh  from  a  meal. 

Unfortunately,  in  certain  ways,  the  fats  are 
not  all  alike.  A  hard  fat  like  mutton  tallow  is 
largely  the  ester  of  C17H35,  while  the  softer 
fat  of  beef  runs  more  to  C15H3i,  and  butter, 
with  its  touch  of  C3H7,  proverbially  melts  in 
the  mouth.  Olive  oil,  with  its  humble  brother 
of  the  cotton  seed,  is  built  on  a  member  of  a 
closely  related  series,  and  has  for  its  radical 
Ci7H33.  This  same  oleine  serves  also  to  soften 
butter  and  lard. 

Each  creature,  then,  whether  animal  or  plant, 
compounds  its  own  characteristic  sort  of  fat 
by  mixing  various  related  bodies.  But  a  dog, 
kept  hungry  and  then  given  unlimited  mutton, 
will  form  dog  fat  in  its  liver,  while  it  lays  down 
sheep  fat  under  its  skin. 

Now  the  digestibility  of  any  one  of  these 


THE  FATS  AND  OILS  IN  THE  BODY    73 

mixtures  depends  on  its  melting  point.  Olive 
oil  and  butter  are  most  easily  handled.  Pork 
fat  and  beef  suet  are  partly  melted  in  the 
stomach.  Mutton  fat  is  distinctly  resistant; 
while  only  a  lumberman  in  the  winter  woods 
or  an  Eskimo  wonted  to  yard-long  strips  of 
whale  blubber,  has  any  real  appetite  for  pure 
stearin,  or  can  get  much  of  any  nutriment  out 
of  it. 

Therefore,  all  slender,  growing  children  and 
overworked,  nervous,  or  anaemic  adults,  who 
most  of  all  need  a  nutritious  diet,  should  look 
to  the  soft  fats  and  avoid  the  hard.  Olive  oil, 
cream,  and  butter,  the  yolks  of  eggs,  nuts,  cod 
liver  oil,  are  often  relished  by  digestions  that 
turn  handsprings  at  the  thought  of  fried  sau- 
sages. Furthermore,  since  part  of  the  trouble 
from  all  fats  is  from  the  fatty  acids  split  off 
during  the  digestion,  there  is  an  obvious  profit 
in  taking  our  fats  without  splitting  off  any 
more  fatty  acid  by  bad  cooking  —  to  say 
nothing  of  the  anything  but  appetizing  smell. 
Half  the  battle  for  the  undernourished,  then, 
is  in  uncooked  fats  with  a  low  melting  point. 


74    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

The  other  half,  since  the  total  quantity  of  fat 
in  any  single  meal  is  strictly  limited,  is  in 
keeping  the  fat  intake  of  each  at  the  optimum 
amount,  just  short  of  the  point  where  the 
generous  diet  begins  to  affect  the  appetite. 

The  most  nutritious  of  the  foodstuffs  is  the 
hardest  to  digest  in  quantity,  and  the  most 
difficult  to  manage  wisely  in  the  daily  food. 


X 

THE  STARCH-SUGAR  GROUP 

THE  starches  and  gums,  the  fiber  of  wood, 
and  the  various  sugars,  form  together 
a  very  well-defined  chemical  group,  the  so- 
called  carbohydrates.  Like  the  fats,  they  all 
contain  carbon;  but  unlike  the  fats,  their 
oxygen  and  hydrogen  are  always  in  the  same 
proportion  as  in  water.  They  differ  only 
slightly  from  one  another,  and  they  change 
back  and  forth  on  the  smallest  provocation. 

Starch,  wood  fiber,  and  dextrin  are  all  alike 
C&HioOs.  A  trifle  more  of  the  elements  of  wa- 
ter makes  Ci2H22On,  which  is  ordinary  cane 
sugar,  malt  sugar,  and  sugar  of  milk.  A  further 
"hydrolosis"  makes  C6H12O6,  which  is  com- 
mon grape  sugar,  equally  common  fruit  sugar, 
and  one  or  two  other  sugars  that  are  not  so 
familiar.  Mere  heating  alters  starch  to  dextrin, 
as  when  bread  is  toasted  or  a  polish  put  on  a 
starched  collar  with  a  hot  iron.  Fruits  ripen 


76    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

from  starch  to  sugar  in  the  sun.  Strong  acids 
make  even  cordwood  turn  sweet. 

Like  changes  occur  with  even  greater  ease 
in  the  body.  The  cow  digests  green  wood.  We, 
on  the  other  hand,  have  to  begin  with  starch, 
and  to  help  along  even  that  by  cooking  —  the 
longer  the  better.  In  the  end,  cooking  and 
digestion  together,  the  starches  and  gums  be- 
come sugars,  and  the  double  sugars,  the  12- 
22-1 1  ?s,  become  the  single  sugars,  the  6-12-6's. 
Three  fifths  of  all  the  food  we  eat  finally  reaches 
the  blood  as  "dextrose,"  or  as  one  of  two  other 
sugars  virtually  identical  with  it. 

Now,  dextrose  is  merely  another  name  for 
grape  sugar;  and  they  both  are  the  same  thing 
as  the  ordinary  "glucose,"  which  is  made  here 
in  the  United  States,  thousands  of  tons  a  year, 
from  corn  starch,  and  used  to  replace  cane 
sugar  in  sirup  and  candy.  It  is  also  one  of  the 
sugars  of  natural  honey  and  of  many  sweet 
fruits  besides  the  grape.  Its  twin,  levulose, 
is  the  other  sugar  of  fruits.  Glucose  is,  to  be 
sure,  only  a  little  more  than  half  as  sweet  as 
cane  sugar;  but  it  makes  it  up  by  being  cheaper 


THE  STARCH-SUGAR  GROUP      77 

and  by  being  distinctly  less  upsetting  to  the 
human  stomach.  It  is  besides  about  the  only 
foodstuff,  except  alcohol,  that  does  not  have 
to  be  digested.  Altogether,  since  dextrose  is 
what  our  tissues  actually  use,  the  common 
prejudice  against  buying  it  frankly  by  the 
pound  seems  just  a  bit  irrational. 

Almost  any  other  foodstuff,  moreover,  ex- 
cept fat,  and  including  even  lean  meat,  is 
likely  to  bring  up  in  the  blood,  sooner  or  later, 
as  this  same  corn  sirup;  while  in  starvation 
even  the  muscles  themselves  are  sugared  off 
and  used  to  run  the  engine.  Dextrose,  in 
short,  with  some  levulose  and  gelactose,  which 
are  virtually  the  same  thing,  is  the  one  main 
working  food  of  the  actual  tissues. 

Oddly  enough,  however,  although  sugar  is 
the  chief  nutrient  of  the  muscles,  the  blood,  at 
any  one  instant,  contains  very  little  indeed  of 
it,  less  than  two  ordinary  lumps  in  the  whole 
gallon  and  a  half.  The  amount,  moreover,  re- 
mains virtually  constant  no  matter  what  we 
eat  or  how  much  we  tire  ourselves  with  work. 
When  the  quantity  of  sugar  in  the  blood  drops 


78    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

below  one  lump,  the  body  makes  more  out  of 
whatever  else  it  can.  When  the  amount  rises 
beyond  two  lumps,  the  excess  is  drained  off  by 
way  of  the  kidneys  and  thrown  away.  Even 
a  pound  of  candy,  eaten  straight  off,  will 
hardly  alter  the  proportion  of  sugar  in  the 
vital  stream. 

The  fact  is,  the  sugar  from  a  digested  meal 
does  not  enter  the  general  circulation.  Instead, 
it  goes  directly  to  the  liver,  and  is  there  undi- 
gested again  into  starch.  This  animal  starch 
or  glycogen  is  stored  in  the  liver,  up  to  some- 
thing less  than  half  a  pound,  and  then,  being 
slowly  changed  once  more  into  sugar,  is  fed 
out  to  the  blood-stream  as  fast  as  the  mus- 
cles burn  it  up.  The  muscles,  in  their  turn,  pick 
up  the  sugar  from  the  blood,  undigest  it  once 
more,  and  hold  it  as  glycogen  until  they  start 
work.  Then  once  again,  apparently,  the  gly- 
cogen changes  back  to  sugar,  mixes  with  oxy- 
gen, and  explodes. 

Liver  and  muscles  together  can  carry  some- 
thing less  than  a  pound  of  animal  starch,  good 
for  some  sixteen  hundred  calories  of  work.  Any 


THE  STARCH-SUGAR  GROUP      79 

excess  of  food  over  this  amount,  that  is  not 
promptly  used  up  in  labor  or  thrown  away, 
has  to  be  stored  as  fat.  Since  twenty  pounds  of 
fat  are  the  equivalent  of  forty-five  pounds  of 
glycogen,  some  of  us  may  well  thank  our  stars 
that  the  permanent  storage  takes  the  more 
concentrated  form. 

The  sugar  in  muscle  and  blood,  then,  to 
adopt  a  figure  from  the  world  of  finance,  is  the 
silver  change  and  the  small  bills  which  we 
carry  ready  at  hand  to  pay  our  way  through 
the  actual  day's  business.  The  glycogen  of 
liver  and  muscle  is  the  roll  of  big  bills  which 
we  tuck  away  in  stocking  or  inner  pocket  to 
break  into  as  the  small  stuff  runs  short.  The 
body  fat  is  our  bank  balance,  which  we  build 
up  day  by  day  as  more  cash  comes  in  than  we 
need  to  spend,  and  draw  on  in  turn  when  in- 
come slackens  or  expenses  run  high.  To  carry 
out  the  figure,  as  we  often  pay  a  part  of  our 
bills  by  check,  without  changing  the  bank  de- 
posit into  actual  cash,  so  we  do  not,  at  least  in 
health,  make  over  the  body  fat  into  sugar,  but 
consume  it  directly  as  it  stands. 


8o    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

But  whether  our  muscles  happen  to  be  using 
sugar  or  fat,  it  all  comes  to  the  same  thing  in 
the  end.  Both  burn  clean,  the  carbon  to  carbon 
dioxid  and  the  hydrogen  to  water.  The  former 
goes  off  by  way  of  the  lungs,  the  latter  is  sim- 
ply added  to  the  blood  as  if  it  had  been  drunk 
from  a  glass.  Neither  puts  any  load  on  the 
organs  of  excretion. 

Sugar  has,  nevertheless,  one  remarkable  dif- 
ference from  most  of  the  other  substances 
that  get  into  the  blood.  Being  an  alcohol,  it  is, 
naturally,  poisonous,  so  poisonous  in  fact  that 
but  for  our  elaborate  device  for  keeping  the 
sugar  content  of  the  blood  below  the  fifth  of  one 
per  cent,  all  the  bread-eating  races  of  mankind 
would  long  ago  have  perished  from  off  the  earth. 

In  the  too-familiar  disease,  diabetes,  some 
failure  of  the  pancreas  limits  or  destroys  the 
ability  of  the  muscles  to  burn  sugar.  The  liver 
can  store  only  a  small  amount.  The  conver- 
sion into  fat  is  a  slow  process.  The  result  is 
that  the  sugar  in  the  blood  rises  beyond  the 
limit  of  safety,  and  the  unfortunate  victim, 
according  to  the  severity  of  the  attack,  is 


THE   STARCH-SUGAR  GROUP      81 

stupid  after  meals,  or  falls  into  coma  and  dies. 
Treatment  is  by  increasing  the  fat  in  the  diet 
and  cutting  down  every  sort  of  food  that  be- 
comes sugar.  With  this  precaution,  patients 
may  live  out  their  lives  in  health.  But  more 
than  one  man  in  such  a  case  has  kicked  over 
the  traces,  eaten  one  meal  of  bread  and  potato, 
and  paid  for  the  indulgence  with  his  life. 

From  this  point  of  view  the  old  question, 
Is  alcohol  a  food  or  a  poison?  becomes  pretty 
meaningless.  Most  foods  are  more  or  less 
poisonous.  Common  alcohol,  being  worth 
some  thirty-five  hundred  calories  to  the  pound, 
is  about  twice  as  nutritious  a  food  as  bread 
or  meat.  It  is  not  by  any  means  twice  as  poi- 
sonous. The  essential  difference  is  that,  in  the 
course  of  some  millions  of  years,  the  animal 
body  has  evolved  a  highly  efficient  apparatus 
for  holding  down  automatically  the  diglucosic 
alcohol  in  the  blood  to  fifteen  parts  in  ten 
thousand.  Therefore  we  handle,  with  every 
meal,  ten  times  the  toxic  dose.  But  we  have 
never,  alas,  evolved  any  such  means  of  taking 
care  of  the  alcohol  of  whiskey  and  champagne. 


XI 

OUR  HUMAN  LIFE-STUFF 

a  EN  all  is  said,  the  sugars  and  starches 
,nd  fats  and  oils  are  only  the  fuel  that 
drives  the  human  engine  —  the  machine  itself 
is  something  quite  different  from  them  all. 

Of  its  infinite  complexity,  this  is  not  the 
place  to  speak.  A  single  cell  from  the  cortex  of 
the  brain,  hardly  in  length  from  end  to  end  the 
thickness  of  a  sheet  of  paper,  has  an  outline 
like  a  winter  tree  against  the  sky.  A  fleck  of 
growing  skin,  far  too  small  to  be  seen  with  the 
unaided  eye,  shows  under  the  microscope  more 
different  and  visible  parts  than  any  watch. 
Heaven  knows  what  there  may  be  in  either 
too  small  to  see.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say 
that  one  human  body  contains  more  different 
structures,  that  have  been  drawn  and  named, 
than  any  city  contains  separate  objects  made 
with  hands,  even  down  to  the  pins  and  nails. 

Here,  however,  we  are  concerned  less  with 


OUR  HUMAN  LIFE-STUFF         83 

the  structure  of  the  human  machine  than  with 
the  stuff  out  of  which  it  is  made. 

"All  flesh  is  not  the  same  flesh;  for  there 
is  one  kind  of  flesh  of  men,  another  flesh  of 
beasts,  another  of  fishes,  and  another  of  birds." 
Furthermore,  within  the  body  of  the  same 
man,  there  is  also  one  kind  of  flesh  of  muscles, 
and  another  kind  of  flesh  of  nerves,  and  still 
other  kinds  of  flesh  of  every  organ  and  tissue 
down  to  the  three  or  four  different  sorts  of 
white  corpuscles  of  the  blood  and  the  seven 
distinguishable  and  separately  named  layers 
in  the  skin  of  the  palm.  All  these  are  different, 
not  merely  in  the  sense  that  a  chair  is  different 
from  a  bureau,  both  being  built  of  wood;  but 
different  in  the  sense  that  an  iron  ship  is  dif- 
ferent from  a  brick  house,  and  corrosive  sub- 
limate, despite  appearances,  is  not  the  same 
thing  as  common  salt.  The  obvious  physical 
difference  between  bone  and  muscle  is  matched 
by  an  equal  difference  of  chemical  nature. 
Even  different  parts  of  the  same  microscopic 
living  cell  are  chemically  unlike. 

Living  tissue  is,  then,  an  enormously  com- 


84    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

plex  chemical  machine,  with  more  different 
forms  of  matter  in  it  than  any  drug  store,  all 
combining  and  separating  and  changing  into 
one  another,  back  and  forth  incessantly  so 
long  as  life  continues,  and  then  undergoing  yet 
other  transformations  the  moment  life  departs. 
So  comparatively  simple  and  stable  a  sub- 
stance as  ordinary  grape  sugar,  left  standing 
in  slightly  alkaline  water,  develops  spontane- 
ously some  two  hundred  known  and  different 
chemical  individuals  —  and  the  blood  always 
contains  grape  sugar  and  is  slightly  alkaline. 
Nobody  knows  what  happens  when  this  same 
sugar  makes  itself  over  into  fat. 

The  substratum  of  all  this  chemical  kaleido- 
scope is,  of  course,  the  living  protoplasm,  "the 
physical  basis  of  life."  This  protoplasm,  in 
turn,  while  it  may  make  or  contain  or  excrete 
almost  anything,  is  always,  to  begin  with, 
some  four  fifths  or  more  water;  and  for  the 
rest,  largely  a  mixture  of  various  members  of 
a  somewhat  ill-defined  chemical  group,  the 
so-called  proteins. 

These,  as  one  might  expect  from  their  rela- 


OUR  HUMAN  LIFE-STUFF         85 

tion  to  the  great  mystery,  are  the  most  com- 
plex of  all  known  bodies,  and  among  the  least 
understood.  If  dextrose,  which  is  merely 
CeH^Oe,  can  take  on  sixteen  different  forms 
and  change  to  two  hundred  other  things  when 
treated  with  alkalies  alone,  one  can  imagine 
the  possibilities  of  Q»Hiit4NiiiS|Oi48,  which  is 
a  common  protein  of  the  body,  or  of  C758- 
HnosNigsFeSsC^g,  which  is  the  red  coloring 
matter  of  the  blood. 

Many  of  these  proteins  are  more  or  less 
characteristic  of  certain  tissues.  Most  crea- 
tures like  ourselves  have  gelatin  in  their  bones; 
and  myosinogen  in  their  muscles,  which  alters 
to  myosin  when  the  living  thing  changes  to 
fresh  meat.  We  feed  our  young  on  various 
milk  proteins,  the  chief  of  which  becomes 
casein  when  we  make  cheese.  Our  blood  con- 
tains two  or  three  albumins  and  globulins, 
besides  the  red  coloring  matter,  the  haemoglo- 
bin, which  we  use  to  carry  the  oxygen  to  the 
tissues,  some  dozen  or  so  in  all.  But  other, 
lower  creatures  have  a  different  outfit,  and  use 
a  copper  protein  in  place  of  our  iron  one  to 


86    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

breathe  with.  Keratin  gives  the  horny  qual- 
ity to  hair  and  nails  and  hoofs  and  claws.  Fi- 
broin and  sericin  account  for  the  properties  of 
silk. 

Strictly,  then,  there  is  no  "protein,"  but  a 
vast  array  of  separate  proteins,  each  with  its 
own  properties  and  its  own  place.  Among 
them,  they  construct  the  infinite  detail  of  the 
animal  machine.  The  proteins,  in  other  words, 
are  the  bricks  and  beams,  the  stones  and 
cement,  out  of  which  we  build  our  house  of 
life.  As  cottage  and  cathedral  may  both  have 
windows  of  the  same  glass,  as  bricks  out  of  the 
same  kiln,  blocks  out  of  the  same  quarry,  may 
be  built  into  the  walls  of  hovel  or  of  palace, 
so  a  like  albumin  may  be  a  part  of  hen's  egg 
or  human  muscle,  the  same  milk  casein  may 
nourish  calf  or  child,  the  same  keratin  form 
the  bird's  feather  and  the  cat's  claw.  Pyramid 
and  office  building,  temple  and  shack,  differ 
from  one  another  in  floor  plan  and  style  of 
architecture;  but  they  are  all  constructed  of 
stone,  iron,  brick,  and  wood.  After  the  same 
fashion,  pond  scum  and  oak  tree  and  man  have 


OUR  HUMAN  LIFE-STUFF         87 

alike  for  their  main  structural  material  water 
and  the  various  proteins. 

The  one  obvious  difference  is  that  while  the 
bricks  stay  bricks  and  the  stones  remain  stones 
for,  it  may  be,  ages,  the  living  substance  of  the 
human  body  is  continually  altering  itself  over 
into  something  else,  as  if  the  attic  stairs  of  the 
suburban  dwelling  should  suddenly  become 
the  parlor  carpet,  and  the  heating  plant  arise 
from  the  cellar  and  transform  itself  into  a 
shelf  of  books. 


XII 

THE  PROTEINS  IN  THE  BODY 

THE  plants  make  their  proteins,  as  they 
make  their  starches  and  oils,  of  the 
materials  of  soil  and  air.  We  animals  cannot 
do  this.  We  can  change  starch  to  sugar,  and 
sugar  to  fat;  and  we  can  use  fat  in  place  of 
glycogen.  But  there  our  power  stops.  We  can- 
not make  any  of  the  proteins  out  of  other  food- 
stuffs, and  the  only  way  for  us  to  get  them  at 
all  is  to  take  them  away  from  whatever  other 
creature  happens  to  be  using  them.  Moreover, 
barring  milk  alone,  we  never  get  hold  of  any 
animal  protein  except  by  murdering  a  former 
owner. 

Once  having  "lifted"  the  protein  supply  of 
any  plant  or  animal,  the  first  thing  we  do  is  to 
take  it  apart,  first  to  protoses,  then  to  pep- 
tones, as  most  of  us  were  taught  in  school. 
Then  finally,  as  only  the  youngest  of  us  have 
been  taught,  since  the  fact  is  new,  as  the  end- 


THE  PROTEINS   IN  THE  BODY      89 

product  of  digestion,  we  split  up  the  original 
complex  protein  into  sundry  amino-acids. 

Some  fifteen  or  twenty  of  these  are  known, 
and  together  they  account  for  more  than  half 
the  protein  molecule.  There  remains,  however, 
a  quarter  or  a  third,  of  certain  among  even  the 
commonest  proteins  which  up  to  the  present 
time  has  not  been  accounted  for. 

With  the  amino-acids,  so  far  as  they  go,  we 
are  on  known  ground.  They  are  about  the 
order  of  complexity  as  the  sugars,  CsHsNC^ 
being  the  empirical  formula  of  one  of  the 
simplest  —  a  long  drop  evidently  from  the 
original  protein.  For  practical  purposes,  we 
may  consider  them  as  something  not  unlike  a 
fat  or  a  sugar  to  which  has  been  added  the  so- 
called  amine  radical,  NH2. 

On  this  amine  radical  hangs  the  whole  story 
of  the  proteins  both  in  the  body  and  the  diet. 
The  fact  that  the  other  main  foodstuffs  do  not 
contain  NH2,  nor  any  nitrogen  out  of  which  it 
can  be  formed,  is  the  sole  reason  why  man  can- 
not live  by  starch  alone,  but  must  seize  upon 
the  living  substance  of  some  other  creature. 


90    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

The  various  proteins,  then,  are  split  down 
into  their  amino-acids,  and  these  in  turn,  being 
soluble,  are  absorbed  into  the  system.  Here 
they  undergo  two  quite  different  fates.  To 
begin  with,  all  of  us  creatures  who  eat  one 
another,  virtually  always  take  in  vastly  more 
amino-products  than  we  can  possibly  use,  even 
up  to  ten  and  twenty  times.  Promptly,  there- 
fore, sometimes  in  the  liver,  often  in  the  in- 
testinal wall  before  the  amino-acid  has  fairly 
entered  the  circulation  at  all,  the  amine  group, 
the  NH2,  is  split  off  from  the  rest,  and  thrown 
away  as  urea.  The  "deaminized"  remain- 
der becomes  dextrose;  and  as  dextrose  goes 
through  precisely  the  same  course  as  if  it  had 
been  made  from  starch  to  begin  with.  In  other 
words,  urea  turns  out  not  to  be,  as  our  school 
physiologies  used  to  tell  us,  the  nitrogenous 
waste  of  the  tissues.  It  is  rather  the  nitroge- 
nous waste  of  the  food,  the  remains  of  super- 
fluous meat  and  eggs  that  are  changed  into 
sugar  before  they  are  allowed  to  enter  the  cir- 
culation. The  nitrogen  of  the  tissue  waste 
appears  largely  as  creatinin. 


THE  PROTEINS  IN  THE  BODY      91 

One  hundred  ounces  of  protein  yield  fifty- 
seven  ounces  of  dextrose,  and  about  all  the 
real  work  we  get  out  of  that  protein  is  what  we 
get  from  the  slightly  more  than  half  as  much 
sugar  which  we  make  from  it.  The  remainder, 
which  contains  the  amine  radical,  gives  rise 
to  various  harmful  products,  among  them  to 
uric  acid,  which  is  the  probable  cause  of  gout 
and  of  some  forms  of  rheumatism.  At  best,  the 
waste  has  to  be  disposed  of  at  considerable  cost. 

Furthermore,  the  splitting-off  of  the  amine 
radical  from  the  dextrose  —  to  put  the  mat- 
ter somewhat  too  briefly  —  sets  free  a  consid- 
erable amount  of  energy.  For  the  most  part, 
this  energy  cannot  be  taken  up  in  useful  work, 
because  the  splitting  takes  place  neither  where 
nor  when  there  is  work  to  do.  It  can  then 
yield  only  heat.  This  heat  may  be  most  con- 
venient in  January  —  it  is  commonly  most 
inconvenient  in  July.  But  whether  the  body 
wants  it  or  not,  it  has  to  be  made  for  the  sake 
of  cutting  out  that  NHk.  Moreover,  several  of 
the  amino-acids,  notably,  glycocoll,  are  speci- 
fic stimulants  to  the  heat-making  apparatus. 


92    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

There  are,  then,  two  good  reasons  for  the  tradi- 
tional heating  quality  of  meat  in  warm  weather, 
when  almost  a  third  of  the  latent  energy  of  the 
proteins  must  needs  become  temperature. 

In  other  words,  the  Eskimo  who  takes  five 
pounds  of  meat  at  a  meal  may  send  no  more 
protein  to  his  muscles  than  the  Hindu  who 
takes  only  five  ounces  with  his  rice.  All  that 
the  tissues  of  either  know  is  that  the  blood- 
stream brings  them  dextrose.  But  whether 
that  dextrose  was  hydrolized  out  of  starch,  or 
ripened  in  grapes,  or  made  by  deaminizing  the 
flesh  of  a  stranded  whale  is  quite  beyond  their 
concern.  In  a  very  real  sense,  therefore,  pro- 
tein is  the  one  foodstuff  which,  in  quantity, 
does  not  "build  tissue,"  but  does  furnish  heat. 

The  purpose  of  all  this  waste  lies  in  the 
small  portion  of  the  protein  end-products  that 
do  not  become  deaminized.  Each  several  pro- 
tein contains  ten  or  fifteen  different  amino- 
acids,  and  each  gets  its  peculiar  quality  from 
the  amount  and  character  of  these,  as  all  the 
words  of  the  dictionary  are  built  of  the  twenty- 
six  letters  of  the  alphabet.  Our  blood  pro- 


THE  PROTEINS   IN  THE  BODY      93 

teins,  for  example,  are  largely  leucin,  with  a 
good  deal  of  glutamic  acid,  and  smaller 
amounts  of  eight  others.  The  two  main  pro- 
teins of  wheat,  on  the  other  hand,  are  largely 
glutamic  acid,  with  smaller  amounts  of  fifteen 
other  things  and  only  a  very  moderate  quan- 
tity of  leucin. 

Suppose  now  a  meal  of  bread,  split  down  to 
its  amino-acids,  absorbed  into  the  blood  and 
ready  to  be  built  again  into  the  blood  proteins. 
It  will  take  three  times  as  much  of  the  bread 
proteins  as  are  to  appear  in  the  blood  in  order 
to  give  enough  leucin  to  make  blood  at  all. 
But  in  that  case,  something  like  nine  tenths 
of  the  glutamic  acid  will  be  useless,  while  for 
neither  of  two  other  amino-bodies  will  there 
be  any  place  whatever.  Roughly,  perhaps  a 
fifth  part  of  the  bread  proteins  will  make  blood. 
Some  of  the  remainder  will  become  other  body 
proteins.  The  rest  will  have  to  be  deaminized, 
and  only  their  sugar  be  used.  Nevertheless,  it 
is  by  no  means  clear  that  a  few  of  the  sim- 
pler amino-acids  are  not  sometimes  made  by 
breaking  up  the  more  complex. 


94    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

It  has  long  been  known,  sometimes  by  bitter 
experience  in  poorhouses  and  elsewhere,  that 
men  can  be  fed  on  gelatin  in  place  of  meat  up 
to  about  two  thirds  the  necessary  intake.  Be- 
yond that  point,  the  appetite  fails,  the  gelatin 
becomes  repugnant  no  matter  how  hungry  the 
subject  of  the  experiment  may  be,  and  in  the 
end,  the  victim  starves. 

Now  it  turns  out  that  gelatin,  though  ap- 
parently containing  all  the  nutrients  of  lean 
meat,  lacks  completely  three  amino-acids 
which  occur,  in  small  amounts,  in  the  chief 
proteins  of  human  blood  and  muscle.  The 
meat  is  cut  down  with  impunity  until  the 
cystin,  tyrosin,  and  tryptophan  begin  to  run 
short.  Then  the  trouble  begins. 

The  same  is  true  of  zein,  one  of  the  main 
proteins  of  corn,  the  gliadin  of  wheat  and  rye, 
and  the  hordein  of  barley  —  except  that  no 
cook  ever  separates  these  proteins  and  serves 
them  apart  from  the  other  proteins  of  grain, 
as  gelatin  is  separated  from  the  other  proteins 
of  flesh.  All  these  want  tryptophan.  None  can 
alone  build  the  more  important  proteins  of  the 


THE  PROTEINS  IN  THE  BODY      95 

body.  On  none  alone,  therefore,  can  life  be 
maintained. 

The  casein  of  cheese,  on  the  other  hand,  is 
a  nearly  perfect  protein,  with  fifteen  out  of  a 
possible  sixteen  of  the  chief  amino-acids,  a 
chance  to  make  the  other,  and  all  in  a  good 
deal  the  same  proportion  as  in  human  blood 
and  muscle.  Glutenin,  one  of  the  other  chief 
proteins  of  the  grains,  makes  also  a  perfect 
score.  Any  of  these  alone  will  sustain  life. 

Contrary,  therefore,  to  what  is  often  as- 
sumed, the  various  proteins  are  very  far  from 
being  all  alike.  Those  of  meat,  fish,  eggs,  milk, 
and  cheese  are  virtually  on  a  level.  Any  of 
them  will  provide  the  entire  outfit  of  amino- 
acids  with  little  waste.  But  it  takes  a  tenth 
more  of  the  proteins  of  rice,  and  a  quarter  more 
of  those  of  potato  to  make  our  body  substance; 
while  we  can  actually  use  only  half  the  NH2  of 
beans,  eaten  alone,  less  than  half  that  of  bread, 
and  only  three  parts  in  ten  of  those  of  Indian 
corn.  But  beans  and  wheat  combined  supple- 
ment one  another  and  approach  perfection. 

In  brief,  then,  a  certain  portion  of  the  pro- 


96    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

teins  of  the  food,  after  being  split  down  into 
their  amino-products,  are  built  up  again  into 
the  somewhat  different  proteins  of  human 
tissue.  Some  twelve  hundred  calories  worth 
of  these  are  kept  on  tap  in  the  blood,  ready  to 
be  redigested  locally  by  muscle  and  gland  and 
nerve,  and  to  become  their  living  protoplasm. 
Since,  however,  the  proteins  of  the  blood  are 
not  quite  the  same  as  those  of  the  various 
tissues,  there  is  another  shrinkage  here,  with 
more  NH2  to  go  to  the  scrap  heap. 

Altogether,  it  is  not  an  especially  efficient 
arrangement.  We  have  to  eat,  and  dispose  of, 
many  times  the  amount  of  protein  which  we 
really  want  for  our  life-stuff,  in  order  not  to 
run  short  of  any  single  amino-body. 

Moreover,  we  have  no  way  of  storing  the 
excess  against  a  rainy  day.  Unless  we  are 
growing,  or  are  building  new  tissue  after  star- 
vation or  a  wasting  illness,  or  are  nourishing  a 
new  life,  we  simply  live  from  hand  to  mouth, 
spending  as  we  go. 


XIII 

THE  PROTEINS  IN  THE  FOOD 

THE  proteins  put  the  eating  classes  be- 
tween the  devil  and  the  deep  sea.  If 
we  eat  too  little,  we  starve  —  starve  just  as 
surely,  though  not  quite  so  soon,  in  the  midst 
of  other  sorts  of  plenty,  as  if  we  had  no  food 
at  all.  The  living  protoplasm  wastes  slowly 
away  by  the  mere  act  of  living  always  at  the 
same  rate  whether  we  work  or  sleep,  and  only 
the  amino-bodies  split  from  the  proteins  can 
make  good  the  loss. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  proteins  are  the 
most  expensive  of  foodstuffs  to  buy  in  the 
market,  and  the  most  expensive  to  care  for  in 
the  body.  Instead  of  burning  clean  to  carbon 
dioxid  and  water  like  the  sugars  and  fats,  and 
going  off  peaceably  through  the  lungs,  the 
amine  radical  drops  down  through  a  score  of 
different  compounds,  none  of  them  wholesome 
and  many  of  them  poisonous.  When  the  pro- 


98    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

tein  digestion  misses  fire,  we  get  auto-intoxi- 
cation and  that  tired  feeling.  When  the  pro- 
tein elimination  goes  wrong,  we  get  more 
auto-intoxication,  rheumatism,  gout,  hard- 
ened arteries,  premature  old  age.  Even  at 
the  best  we  risk  ptomain  poisoning  and  sun- 
stroke. Meat  is,  in  fact,  almost  as  deadly  as 
bread  and  potatoes,  while  we  have  no  such 
ingenious  machinery  to  keep  it  from  killing 
us. 

It  becomes  the  part  of  wisdom,  therefore, 
to  keep  the  protein  intake  pretty  well  down 
to  the  lower  limit.  "Omnivorous  man,"  it  has 
been  cleverly  said,  "who  in  his  omnivorous 
privilege  has  a  choice  of  foodstuffs,  does  not, 
when  wise,  feed  his  furnace  fires  with  protein, 
any  more  than  he  would  stoke  the  furnace  of 
his  house  with  fine  brass-bound  cabinet  furni- 
ture. The  metal  fittings,  in  such  case,  would 
not  burn,  and  their  warped  and  twisted  shapes 
would  only  clog  the  grate,  while  costly  carved 
rosewood  or  polished  mahogany  would  give  no 
more  heat  than  plain  pine  sticks.  In  other 
words,  the  oxidation  of  the  large  amount  of 


THE  PROTEINS  IN  THE  FOOD      99 

protein  necessary  for  fuel  service  would  mean 
a  serious  tax  upon  the  energies  of  liver  and 
kidneys,  and  an  impregnation  of  blood  and 
tissues  with  a  considerable  proportion  of  more 
or  less  poisonous  waste  products,  all  for  the 
sake  of  a  combustion  yield  of  energy  that 
could  be  got  just  as  well  out  of  simpler  and 
safer  foods." 

Theoretically,  it  should  be  possible  to  pick 
just  the  right  combination  of  food  proteins  to 
give  just  the  right  amino-acids  to  build  the 
proteins  of  the  body,  and  thus  to  cut  down  the 
total  intake  below  a  single  ounce  a  day.  Prac- 
tically, since  mankind  insists  on  eating  real 
food,  general  experience  in  Western  Europe 
and  America  has  pitched  upon  about  four  and 
a  half  ounces  as  the  working  minimum. 

The  real  difficulty  is  to  avoid  eating  a  great 
deal  more.  The  Russian  peasant,  living  en- 
tirely on  black  bread,  and  eating  the  three 
pounds  or  more  that  it  will  take  to  do  the  day's 
work,  gets  five  ounces  of  protein  along  with 
it.  If  he  lived  on  milk,  he  would  get  seven. 
The  Irishman  of  tradition  fed  on  potatoes.  If 


ioo    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

he  had  actually  eaten  nothing  else,  the  eight 
pounds  needed  daily  to  cover  his  energy  re- 
quirement would  have  given  him  three  ounces 
of  protein.  He  actually  did  eat  a  great  deal  of 
oatmeal,  which  is  sixteen  per  cent  proteins. 
Even  rice,  that  special  bugaboo  of  persons  who 
believe  in  high  living,  affords  nearly  three 
ounces  of  protein  along  with  the  starch  for  a 
day's  work. 

Practically,  of  course,  nobody  ever  does  eat 
bread  or  potatoes  or  rice  or  oatmeal  and  noth- 
ing else.  And  the  something  else  commonly 
jumps  the  protein  well  above  the  minimum 
limit.  Dried  fish,  with  which  the  Japanese 
piece  out  their  rice,  lean  meat,  peas,  beans, 
cheese,  nuts,  are  all  from  a  fifth  to  a  third 
proteins.  The  fruits  and  the  fresh  vegetables, 
though  mostly  water,  commonly  have  a  tenth, 
and  sometimes  have  a  third  of  their  dry  solids 
proteins.  Clams  and  oysters,  and  the  fishes 
that  are  not  oily,  leaving  out  the  water,  are 
four  fifths  and  nine  tenths.  Sugar,  and  the 
cooking  fats  are  virtually  the  only  foods  that 
are  quite  without  NH2. 


THE  PROTEINS   IN  THE   FOOD    101 

In  other  words,  we  well-fed  American  citi- 
zens, doing  enough  work  to  give  us  an  appetite, 
and  needing  say  twenty-five  hundred  calories 
to  work  on,  can  only  by  careful  planning  keep 
our  protein  intake  down  anywhere  near  the 
four-and-a-half-ounce  minimum.  Many  pros- 
perous American  workingmen  in  the  cities 
probably  get  twice  more  than  is  good  for  them. 
A  few  sedentary  men,  however,  and  not  a  few 
women,  doing  less  than  two  thousand  calories 
of  work  and  eating  lightly,  are  down  close  to 
the  lower  limit. 

Just  where  this  lower  limit  is,  is  by  no  means 
so  certain  as  it  seemed  a  decade  ago.  The  four 
and  a  half  ounces  of  the  so-called  Voit  stand- 
ard was  determined  by  observation  of  what 
European  laborers  actually  do  eat.  How  much 
less  they  might  have  eaten,  and  whether  the 
four  and  a  half  ounces  is  really  enough,  has  had 
to  be  found  by  experiment. 

Voit  himself  thought  the  four  and  a  half 
ounces  too  much.  He  was  familiar  with  the 
German  army  ration  which  gives  nearly  an 
ounce  less,  or  about  half  the  amount  of  the 


102    NUTRITION'  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

United  States  army  ration;  and  he  also  studied, 
a  quarter  of  a  century  ago,  the  case  of  a  vege- 
tarian who  held  his  protein  intake  below  two 
ounces. 

Within  this  century,  Mr.  Horace  Fletcher's 
week  with  the  Yale  crew  in  training  was  done 
on  one  and  three  quarters  ounces  of  protein 
daily,  although  he  weighed  a  hundred  and  sixty- 
five  pounds  and  had  not  been  exercising.  Now 
for  some  ten  years,  moreover,  Mr.  Fletcher 
claims  to  have  lived  in  uncommonly  good 
health  and  to  have  kept  up  his  bodily  repairs 
on  about  this  intake. 

Chittenden's  famous  "hunger  squad"  was 
made  up  of  five  University  professors  busied 
with  their  teaching,  eight  student  athletes  in 
training,  and  thirteen  soldiers  from  the  regular 
army,  who  followed  the  ordinary  routine  of 
garrison  duty.  The  men  were  also  of  all  sizes 
from  less  than  a  hundred  and  twenty  pounds 
up  to  more  than  a  hundred  and  eighty.  The 
trial  lasted  five  months,  and  all  the  subjects 
remained  throughout  in  "nitrogenous  equi- 
librium"—  that  is  to  say,  the  intake  of  NH2 


THE  PROTEINS  IN  THE  FOOD    103 

in  the  food  balanced  fully  the  protoplasmic 
waste. 

The  largest  eater  of  the  lot,  one  of  the  ath- 
letes and  a  big  man,  consumed  only  two  and 
a  half  ounces  of  protein  daily.  The  largest  man 
of  them,  also  an  athlete,  was  down  virtually 
to  two.  One  of  the  professors,  a  little  man, 
weighing  only  a  hundred  and  thirty  pounds, 
lived  throughout  the  entire  period  on  a  daily 
protein  allowance  of  one  ounce  and  a  quarter. 

Incidentally,  it  is  interesting  to  note  that 
the  middle-aged  professors,  sitting  at  their 
desks,  actually  used  for  their  protoplasmic 
renewal  more  than  eighty  per  cent  as  much 
food  as  the  husky  young  athletes  who  were 
winning  championship  games,  and  ninety-four 
per  cent  as  much  as  the  soldiers  under  mili- 
tary regime.  Leaving  out  the  little  professor 
who  lived  on  air,  the  professional  men  and 
the  laborers  are  virtually  level — a  very  pretty 
demonstration,  if  one  were  needed,  of  our 
modern  doctrine  that  the  working  muscle 
does  not  consume  the  living  part  of  its  own 
substance.  The  instructors  needed  nearly  a 


104    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

fifth  less  protein  than  their  pupils  because 
they  actually  were  just  about  a  fifth  smaller 
men.  Chittenden  himself,  for  a  year  and  a 
half,  held  his  own  protein  intake  below  one 
and  a  half  ounces,  with  considerable  improve- 
ment in  health  and  muscular  endurance.  The 
Scandinavian  physiologist,  Siven,  thirty-two 
years  old  and  weighing  one  hundred  and 
forty-five  pounds,  kept  his  body  proteins  in- 
tact for  short  periods  by  taking  in  but  one 
ounce  with  his  daily  food.  By  picking  his  pro- 
teins wisely  and  then  helping  them  out  with 
just  the  right  amino-acids,  he  actually  reduced 
his  intake  to  slightly  more  than  half  an  ounce, 
or  just  about  the  daily  waste  of  the  living 
tissue  itself  when  the  diet  is  ample  but  con- 
tains no  NH2. 

In  other  words,  the  "Voit  standard"  of 
four  and  a  half  ounces  turrs  out  to  be  based 
less  on  the  real  needs  of  the  body  than  on  the 
demands  of  an  appetite  evolved  to  meet  the 
conditions  of  primitive  society,  when  hunters 
went  hungry  for  a  week,  lived  on  their  own 
tissue,  and  then  made  it  up  at  one  vast  gorge. 


THE  PROTEINS  IN  THE  FOOD    105 

The  human  appetite  for  proteins  is  not  ad- 
justed to  regular  civilized  life.  The  "Chitten- 
den  standard,"  two  ounces  of  protein  daily, 
is  quite  sufficient  —  if  one  gets  it  in  the  right 
form  and  every  day. 

Clearly,  then,  if  the  low-paid  laborers  of 
Europe,  who  are  the  raw  material  of  the  Voit 
standard,  are  getting  more  than  twice  the  pro- 
tein that  they  need,  the  practical  danger  that 
any  one  of  us  will  get  too  little  is  quite  negligi- 
ble. People  who  get  enough  to  eat  at  all,  will 
always  get  enough  of  the  amine  radical  along 
with  it. 


XIV 

SALTS  AND  SAVORS 

THE  paradox  of  nutrition  is  the  impor- 
tance of  the  non-nutritious  foods.  All 
the  water  we  drink  in  a  year  will  not  wink  an 
eyelid,  yet  we  die  more  promptly  for  lack  of 
water  than  for  lack  of  all  nutritious  foodstuffs 
combined.  The  amino-acids  of  the  proteins 
which  we  actually  build  into  our  protoplasm 
are  hardly  a  mouthful  a  day.  But  without  that 
little,  life  cannot  go  on.  The  merest  pinch  of 
various  salts  determines  whether  we  get  any 
good  whatever  out  of  all  the  rest  of  our  food, 
so  that  without  these  salts,  we  lie  down  and 
die  of  starvation  just  as  promptly  on  three 
square  meals  a  day  as  if  we  tried  to  live  on 
air. 

We  use  lime  salts  to  form  our  bones  — 
phosphates,  carbonates,  chlorides,  and  fluor- 
ides, with  some  magnesium.  Without  these  we 
should  be  as  spineless  as  Burbank's  new  cactus. 


SALTS  AND  SAVORS  107 

Other  phosphates  are  built  into  the  living  pro- 
toplasm. Common  sodium  chlorid  yields  the 
acid  of  the  gastric  juice  and  salts  the  blood. 
The  tissues  themselves  are  salted  with  po- 
tassium. All  the  proteins  contain  sulphur. 
"There  is  iron  in  the  blood,"  in  the  haemoglo- 
bin; without  it  we  could  not  breathe.  The 
body  always  contains  lithium  and  silicon,  and 
occasionally  manganese,  copper,  and  lead. 

The  balance  of  these  various  minerals,  also, 
seems  hardly  less  important  than  their  pres- 
ence in  blood-stream  or  sea-water.  A  little 
more  lime  in  place  of  table  salt  checks  the 
heart-beat  and  paralyzes  all  the  voluntary 
muscles.  A  little  more  table  salt  in  place  of 
the  lime  sets  all  the  muscles  to  beating  rhyth- 
mically like  hearts.  With  just  the  right  amount 
of  this,  that,  and  the  other  metallic  ions,  we 
have  eggs  developing  with  only  one  parent 
in  place  of  the  customary  two,  embryos  trying 
to  grow  up  without  any  hearts,  cyclopean 
monsters  with  one  medial  eye,  and  a  whole 
museum  of  all  sorts  of  strange  creatures,  each 
made  by  the  particular  medium  in  which  it 


io8    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

has  grown  up.   But  a  tough  old  lobster  will 
not  live  five  minutes  in  cold  fresh  water. 

The  animal  body,  in  other  words,  is  not 
merely  a  chemical  machine,  it  is  a  chemical 
machine  built  to  run  in  some  particular  salt 
solution.  In  ways  that  are  only  partly  under- 
stood the  non-nutrient  salts  of  the  food  control 
the  interaction  of  the  living  tissue  with  the 
nutrients. 

Even  less  understood  are  certain  uncanny 
organic  substances,  the  vitamines.  The  plants, 
apparently,  make  them;  and  then  they  are 
passed  along  from  animal  to  animal  like  the 
proteins,  until  they  run  out  or  are  destroyed 
by  over-cooking.  Their  quantity  in  the  body  is 
of  the  general  order  of  one  part  in  a  hundred 
thousand.  But  in  their  absence  we  sicken  of 
some  disease  of  mal-nutrition,  like  scurvy, 
rickets,  beri-beri,  or  pellagra,  which  are  the 
penalty  of  a  one-sided  diet. 

Fortunately,  however,  all  this  varied  array 
of  essential  food  elements  takes  care  of  itself. 
We  eat  the  flesh  of  other  living  things,  which 
always,  by  the  same  token,  have  all  the 


SALTS  AND  SAVORS  109 

elements  necessary  for  life.  Without  taking 
thought  and  quite  in  spite  of  ourselves,  we 
take  over  their  supply.  Common  salt  is  the 
only  non-nutritious  solid  which  we  deliber- 
ately add.  Foods  as  they  come,  with  "salt  to 
taste,"  give  us  a  great  deal  more  of  all  these 
things  than  we  can  ever  use. 

To  this,  nevertheless,  there  is  one  excep- 
tion. The  fluid  that  nourishes  our  infancy  is 
short  of  iron.  Therefore  we  arrive  in  the  world 
with  enough  extra  stored  in  our  livers  to  keep 
us  going  for  about  a  year.  After  that,  for  the 
remainder  of  our  days,  we  risk  anaemia  if  we 
fail  to  eat  eggs,  meat,  green  vegetables,  or 
some  other  special  iron-bearing  food. 

It  is,  therefore,  sheer  superstition  to  con- 
sider fish  to  be  "brain  food,"  because  it  is  rich 
in  phosphorus;  or  to  prefer  whole  wheat  bread 
to  white,  because  the  bolted  flour  "has  been 
robbed  of  its  phosphates."  The  facts  are  cor- 
rect. Fish  and  nervous  tissue  are  long  on 
phosphorus.  Graham  flour  does  have  three 
times  the  mineral  matter  of  the  ordinary  sorts. 
But  when  other  foods  have  already  more  than 


i  io    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

enough,  why  load  the  body  with  the  task  of 
getting  rid  of  any  further  supply?  Because  a 
naked  man  is  chilly,  it  does  not  follow  that  we 
need  any  of  us  wear  two  shirts. 

Hardly  less  important  than  the  pinch  of 
various  salts  in  our  viands  are  the  various  es- 
sential oils,  fruit  acids,  condiments,  and  the 
like,  that  please  nose  and  palate.  These  have 
little  or  no  real  function  in  the  body.  Ap- 
parently we  never  make  them  into  flesh  or 
blood,  while  if  we  ever  get  any  work  out  of 
them,  the  amount  is  likely  to  be  too  small  to 
measure.  Yet  the  animal  body  is  built  to  like 
certain  things;  and  in  general,  what  we  do  not 
like  is  not  good  for  us.  Practically,  therefore, 
it  is  quite  as  important  that  food  should  be 
appetizing  as  that  it  should  be  nutritious. 

To  this  there  is,  again,  one  exception.  The 
special  flavors  of  meat  and  fish  are  due  to  a 
different  group  of  bodies  from  those  of  most 
other  foodstuffs.  Instead  of  being  essences  of 
the  general  nature  of  the  perfume  of  flowers, 
they  are  the  decomposition  products  of  the 
working  muscle,  broken-down  proteins  on 


SALTS  AND   SAVORS  in 

their  way  to  excretion.  They  are,  in  other 
words,  more  of  those  troublesome  amino- 
bodies  which  arise  from  all  protein  food. 

If,  then,  we  take  our  proteins  as  cheese  or 
nuts,  we  have  to  get  rid  of  only  the  nitrogen 
of  the  nutrient  itself.  But  if  we  take  the  same 
quantity  as  fish,  flesh,  or  fowl,  we  must  in  ad- 
dition get  rid  of  the  nitrogen  of  the  "extrac- 
tives" which  give  the  flavor  to  them  all. 
Hence  follows  the  time-honored  practice  of 
reducing  the  meat  consumption  of  the  gouty 
and  the  rheumatic,  who  are  being  poisoned  by 
their  own  protein  derivatives. 

Many  "meat  extracts,"  "invalid  foods," 
"concentrated  foods,"  "brain  restorers,"  and 
the  like,  consist  largely  of  these  same  extrac- 
tives. So,  too,  does  the  ordinary  household 
"beef  tea."  Their  agreeable  flavors  are  usually 
a  harmless  indulgence,  but  they  are  in  no  sense 
proper  foods,  for  they  commonly  leave  the 
body  without  being  put  to  any  use. 

Finally,  there  are  the  alkaloids,  as  we  get 
them  in  tea,  coffee,  and  in  various  other  drinks 
under  all  sorts  of  misleading  names.  All  these 


ii2    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

are  poisons,  and  dangerous  habit-forming 
drugs.  Beer,  wine,  and  distilled  liquors, 
though  they  are  all  true  foods,  are  practically 
in  the  same  boat  as  the  alkaloids. 

Oddly  enough,  alcohol  in  the  blood  is  also 
in  the  same  boat  with  the  superfluous  proteins. 
The  oxidizing  of  the  one  and  the  splitting-off 
of  the  amino  group  from  the  other  both  yield 
energy,  but  only  in  the  form  of  heat,  never  as 
muscular  labor.  They  two  are  the  sole  excep- 
tion to  the  rule  that  all  foodstuffs  do  any  kind 
of  work. 

Evidently  then,  there  are  many  important, 
valuable,  and  even  essential  foods,  which  are 
either  quite  non-nutritious  or  else  are  taken  in 
such  small  quantity  that  their  nutriment  is 
practically  negligible.  The  half-pint  of  clear 
soup  which  introduces  a  dinner  may  be  good 
for  only  twenty  calories  of  actual  work,  and 
yet  may  put  a  tired  diner  into  a  state  of  mind 
and  body  to  utilize  the  thousand  or  more 
which  follow  it.  The  onion  of  stew  or  chowder 
is  nothing  —  but  it  makes  all  the  rest  easy 
to  eat.  Cucumbers  and  celery,  radishes  and 


SALTS  AND  SAVORS  113 

lettuce  help  out  the  appetite  far  more  than 
their  eighty  and  ninety  calories  to  the  pound 
helps  out  the  nutrition.  Even  the  habit-form- 
ing drugs  may  on  occasion  be  justified  by  their 
indirect  good. 

One  gets  a  striking  illustration  of  this  prin- 
ciple in  the  case  of  salads.  Nobody  wants  to 
eat  cold  scraps  out  of  the  ice-box.  Dry  crackers 
are  not  appetizing  in  spite  of  their  two  thou- 
sand units  of  nutriment;  nor  olive  oil,  straight, 
for  all  its  forty-two  hundred.  But  add  a  few 
ounces  of  lettuce  leaves  and  a  few  drops  of 
vinegar,  rub  a  bit  of  garlic  or  a  slice  of  onion 
on  the  dish,  and  behold  an  attractive  and 
nutritious  meal.  The  onion  and  the  vinegar 
carry  the  lettuce;  the  lettuce  carries  the  oil; 
and  the  salad  carries  the  crackers.  The  less 
nutritious  portion  is  the  price  of  eating  the 
rest. 

"Pure"  foods  are  largely  flavorless.  "Is 
there  any  taste  in  the  white  of  an  egg?"  —  or 
in  any  other  unadulterated  protein,  or  in  any 
fat,  or  in  any  carbohydrate  except  the  sugars  ? 
The  art  of  cookery  consists  in  sophisticating 


ii4    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

still  further  with  agreeable  essences,  the  food- 
stuffs which  Nature  has  already  contaminated 
with  inorganic  salts. 

Practically,  therefore,  this  whole  compli- 
cated question  of  the  non-nutritious  foods  is 
taken  care  of  by  the  simple  device  of  drink- 
ing plenty  of  water,  eating  plenty  of  potatoes 
and  bread,  a  reasonable  amount  of  fruit  and 
garden  stuff;  and  after  that,  eating,  if  not  al- 
ways what  one  likes,  at  least  never  what  one 
does  not.  After  all,  the  appetite  is  a  great 
deal  older  than  chemical  physiology,  and  in 
most  small  matters,  much  the  safer  guide. 


XV 

THE  BALANCED  DIET 

THEORETICALLY,  it  should  be  pos- 
sible to  do  without  the  entire  starch- 
sugar  group  or  to  dispense  with  all  the  fats 
and  oils.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  a  starving  man 
is  really  living  on  a  fat-protein  diet,  while  the 
Eskimo,  living  where  there  is  no  vegetation, 
must  perforce  live  entirely  on  the  fat  and  pro- 
teins of  other  animals.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  Japanese  laborer  or  soldier,  living  on  rice, 
green  vegetables,  and  dried  fish,  comes  pretty 
close  to  getting  no  fat  at  all.  Neither  people 
seems  to  be  any  the  worse  for  its  one-sided 
diet.  The  one  simply  builds  fat  out  of  starch; 
the  other  splits  sugar  out  of  protein. 

Nevertheless,  there  is  a  certain  practical 
advantage  in  distributing  the  intake  of  each 
meal  among  the  three  main  foodstuffs.  Each 
of  these  has  its  somewhat  special  place  in 
the  bodily  economy.  Each  also  has  a  special 


ii6    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

apparatus  for  its  digestion,  which  works  best 
under  a  steady  load. 

Now  man  is  a  starch-eating  omnivore.  That 
is  to  say,  he  seems  on  the  whole  to  thrive  best 
on  a  mixed  diet  that  is  half  starch,  with  no 
small  part  of  the  remainder  the  various  su- 
gars. Starch,  properly  and  sufficiently  cooked, 
and  properly  taken  care  of  in  the  mouth,  is 
the  one  food  which  never  makes  any  trouble 
anywhere  in  any  normal  body.  Its  digestion 
is  simple.  It  has  no  by-products,  either  good 
or  bad.  It  burns  clean,  and  its  end-products 
pass  off  harmlessly  with  the  breath.  Alto- 
gether it  is  the  one  safe  food,  the  foundation 
and  the  first  and  second  stories  of  any  rational 
diet. 

General  experience  in  Europe  and  America 
supplements  the  starch-sugar  ration  by  about 
one  tenth  fat  by  dry  weight.  Hospital  dietaries 
run  from  six  to  eighteen  per  cent.  The  Voit 
standard  lies  between  eight  per  cent  for  light 
work  and  thirteen  for  heavy.  Wood's  and 
Mansfield's  Maine  lumbermen,  chopping  in 
the  cold,  took  a  quarter  of  their  food  as  fat. 


THE  BALANCED  DIET  117 

Since,  however,  the  fats  and  oils  are  more 
than  twice  as  nutritious  as  other  foodstuffs, 
the  tenth  or  the  quarter  by  weight,  means  a 
fifth  or  a  half  the  day's  energy. 

It  is  a  simple  matter  enough,  using  the  or- 
dinary tables,  to  figure  out  the  fat  content  in 
any  meal,  and  to  make  sure  of  the  tenth  by 
dry  weight  or  the  fifth  by  energy.  But  it  is 
not  commonly  worth  while.  People  vary  so 
much  in  their  liking  for  fats  and  their  ability 
to  handle  them,  there  is  so  much  idiosyncracy 
of  all  sorts,  that  mere  averages  have  little 
meaning,  and  one  man's  meat  is  another  man's 
poison.  Practically,  the  most  that  cook  can  do 
is  to  avoid  a  run  of  especially  fat  dishes  or  of 
especially  lean  ones,  and  to  give  each  member 
of  the  household  a  certain  amount  of  leeway 
in  each  meal.  Persons  who  cannot  eat  much 
cooked  fat  have  to  make  it  up  with  butter, 
cheese,  cream,  nuts,  and  oil.  Persons  who  can- 
not eat  more  than  a  little  of  any  sort  ought 
to  have  a  chance  to  dodge  what  they  do  not 
want.  Each  one  may  well  make  sure  of  some 
fat  at  each  meal,  and  try  on  the  whole  to 


n8     NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

keep  the  amount  rather  up  than  down.  Be- 
yond this,  appetite  and  judgment  are  usually 
sounder  guides  than  chemistry  and  arithmetic. 

The  proteins  also,  among  civilized  peoples, 
commonly  run  to  a  tenth  or  more  of  the  dry 
weight  of  the  daily  food;  though  certain  wild 
tribes  of  hunters  go  to  a  half.  A  starving  man 
takes  thirteen  per  cent  of  his  day's  energy  out 
of  his  body  proteins.  Volt's  standard  calls 
for  fifteen  per  cent;  Chittenden's  for  eight; 
Siven  managed  with  five.  General  scientific 
opinion  of  the  day  is  that  Voit's  standard  is 
unnecessarily  high,  Siven's  unpractically  low, 
and  Chittenden's  entirely  workable  only  if  ap- 
plied with  uncommon  wisdom.  As  we  should 
perhaps  expect  on  grounds  of  theory,  the 
varied  diet  and  better  cooking  of  the  well- 
to-do  classes  seem  to  permit  a  slightly  lower 
protein  intake  than  is  advisable  for  the  poor. 

A  remarkably  large  number  of  the  main 
staple  foods  which  the  human  race  has  been 
eating  these  hundred  thousand  years  have 
their  protein  content  between  the  Chittenden 
and  the  Voit  standards.  Rice  and  rye  lie 


THE  BALANCED  DIET  119 

close  to  the  lower  limit.  Potatoes  and  corn 
meal  have  almost  exactly  a  tenth  of  their  total 
energy  in  their  proteins.  The  crude  starchy 
vegetables,  so  far  as  they  are  anything  but 
cellulose  and  water,  average  close  around  this 
fraction.  Wheat  and  oats  run  thirteen  and 
fifteen  per  cent  proteins,  with  nothing  to 
choose  among  Graham,  whole  wheat,  and 
white  flours,  breakfast  foods,  macaroni,  or 
plain  old-fashioned  bread. 

The  ancient  staff  of  life,  eaten  alone,  hits 
the  Voit  standard  about  as  closely  as  the  way- 
faring man  can  measure.  Spread  moderately 
with  butter,  the  combination  drops  its  protein 
to  the  Chittenden  standard,  and  hits  accu- 
rately the  correct  proportion  of  fat.  Bread  and 
butter  is,  therefore,  the  normal  human  food, 
the  paragon  of  viands.  Everything  made 
with  flour,  and  a  little  "short,"  —  that  is  to 
say,  all  cookies,  cakes,  crackers,  virtually 
everything  to  be  bought  in  a  bake-shop  ex- 
cept doughnuts  and  pies,  —  are  only  other 
forms  of  bread,  and  like  it  are  theoretically 
right. 


120    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

The  fattest  cuts  of  meat  also,  especially 
mutton  and  pork,  have  not  far  from  the  proper 
protein  content.  Since,  however,  they  contain 
virtually  nothing  of  the  starch-sugar  group 
their  "balance"  is  otherwise  entirely  wrong. 
Butter,  oil,  the  clear  fats  of  meat,  and  the  like 
have  virtually  no  protein.  The  fruits,  also, 
whether  dry  or  fresh,  are  all  low  —  from  six 
per  cent  down.  So,  too,  are  all  forms  of  nearly 
pure  starch  and  sugar  —  arrowroot,  corn- 
starch,  tapioca,  candy,  sirup. 

All  forms  of  muscle,  on  the  contrary,  soar 
far  beyond  even  the  Voit  standard.  Average 
cuts  of  beef  run  twenty  and  thirty  per  cent 
protein;  lean  cuts  go  to  fifty  and  seventy. 
Salmon,  though  among  the  fattest  of  fishes,  is 
half  protein;  the  white  fishes  are  three  and 
four  parts  in  five.  Fowl  is  about  like  fish. 
Eggs  have  a  third  of  their  energy  in  their  pro- 
teins, with  the  whites  nine  tenths. 

Nuts  average  around  the  Voit  standard, 
with  a  range  from  ten  to  twenty  per  cent.  The 
cheeses  are  from  one  quarter  to  three  quarters 
protein  according  as  they  are  more  or  less  fat. 


THE  BALANCED  DIET          121 

Butter  and  cheese  together,  therefore,  cover 
the  entire  range  of  the  meats,  with  milk  at 
twenty  per  cent  protein,  not  far  from  the 
average  of  everything  in  the  butcher-shop. 

Curiously  enough,  virtually  all  our  time- 
honored  combinations  —  pork  and  beans, 
beans  and  brown  bread,  doughnuts  and  cheese, 
cheese  with  apple  pie,  meat  and  potato,  fish 
and  potato,  crackers  and  milk,  liver  and  bacon, 
bacon  and  eggs,  mush  and  milk,  oysters  and 
crackers,  —  all  have  one  member  of  the  pair 
markedly  above  the  Voit  standard  and  the 
other  distinctly  below,  so  that  the  two  aver- 
age pretty  close  to  the  customary  fifteen  per 
cent.  Normal  human  appetites  seem  to  gravi- 
tate naturally  toward  that  demand. 

Since,  however,  normal  human  appetites 
seem  to  gravitate  with  equal  unanimity  to- 
ward beer,  the  normal  human  appetite  is  by 
no  means  good  authority,  and  is  probably 
quite  wrong  in  thinking  it  needs  the  Voit 
standard  of  proteins.  Voit's  allowance  is 
more  wisely  taken  as  a  maximum,  from  which 
the  philosopher,  as  inclination  and  habit  per- 


122    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

mit,  works  down  toward  the  Chittenden  stand- 
ard. Certainly  there  is  no  ground,  either  in 
theory  or  in  experience,  for  ever  eating  meat 
or  fish  oftener  than  once  a  day  —  still  less  for 
the  pound  at  a  meal  that  is  rather  in  the  man- 
ner of  a  primitive  savage  than  a  rational  man. 
With  our  American  customs,  therefore,  the 
actual  practice  of  "balancing"  meals  resolves 
itself  into  keeping  down  the  intake  of  pro- 
teins in  each  single  one.  The  great  mass  of 
nutritious  foods,  including  potatoes  and  every- 
thing made  of  flour,  are  about  right  anyway. 
If,  then,  we  add,  for  flavor  and  variety,  meat, 
fish,  eggs,  cheese,  game,  nuts,  —  as  we  practi- 
cally must,  —  we  may  well  avoid  making  both 
the  piece  of  resistance  and  the  dessert  highly 
nitrogenous,  and  not  lunch  on  fish  or  scram- 
bled eggs  on  the  same  day  when  we  dine  on 
roast  beef. 


XVI 

FIGURING  A  DIETARY 

LET  us  for  the  moment  turn  from  all  mat- 
ters of  theory  to  certain  actual  meals — 
to  a  portion  of  those  already  figured  for  total 
nutrition  without  regard  to  the  form  in  which 
it  comes. 

The  bread  and  butter  of  the  Continental 
breakfast  gives,  from  the  tables,  in  calories:  — 


Bread  (i  oz.) 

4  02. 

Butter  (i  oz.) 
i  02. 
Or  for  the  bread  and  butter 

together  37.2        128.8        252          418 

Dividing  the  separate  items 
by  the  total,  the  percent- 
ages become,  8.9  30.8  60.3  100 

In  other  words,  our  plain  bread  and  butter 
alone  is  very  close  to  a  perfectly  balanced 
meal.  A  certain  frugality  with  the  butter 
would  bring  the  ration  a  great  deal  nearer 


Starch- 

Proteins 

Fats 

sugars 

Total 

(9-3) 

(3-7) 

(63) 

(76) 

37.2 

14.8 

252 

304 

(228) 

(228) 

114 

114 

124    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

the  theoretic  one  tenth  proteins  and  one  fifth 
fat  than  a  carefully  dieted  hospital  patient 
always  gets  to  his  prescription. 

But  the  traditional  breakfast  includes  cof- 
fee. "Coffee  with  sugar  and  cream,"  may  be 
a  great  many  different  compounds,  according 
to  the  number  of  lumps  of  the  one  and  the 
color  of  the  other.  A  fair  guess  will  be:  — 

Starch- 
Proteins    Fats        sugars      Total 

10          40          50         100 
This  gives  for  the  entire  breakfast:  — 

Starch- 
Proteins      Fats         sugars    Total 

Calories  47.2       168.8       302          518 

Per  cents  9.1         32.6         58.3 

The  meal  is  then  somewhat  over-fat  and  possi- 
bly a  little  short  of  proteins.  The  fats,  how- 
ever, are  the  especially  digestible  cream  and 
butter,  while  succeeding  meals  are  pretty  cer- 
tain to  be  long  on  proteins.  Altogether,  the 
universal  practice  of  Western  Europe  is  amply 
borne  out.  The  addition  of  jam,  after  the 
English  manner,  to  replace  part  of  the  butter, 
would  do  away  with  any  excess  of  fats. 


FIGURING  A  DIETARY          125 

But  suppose  there  are  children  In  the  family, 
who  are  given  milk  in  place  of  coffee  —  a  good 
old-fashioned  mugful  amounting  to  a  fair  half- 
pint.  The  milk  will  figure:  — 

Starch- 
Proteins      Fats       sugars     Total 

29.6        85.6        44.8       160 
And  the  entire  meal  then  becomes:  — 

Starch- 
Proteins      Fats        sugars     Total 

Calories  66.8       214.4       296.8       578 

Per  cents  1 1.6         37.1          51.3 

Evidently  the  meal  is  ample  in  quantity,  and 
about  ideal  in  quality  for  a  growing  child 
who,  as  we  shall  see  later  in  more  detail, 
needs  much  more  fat  than  an  adult.  The  im- 
memorial diet  of  childhood  turns  out  to  be  a 
wise  choice. 

And  finally,  not  to  ring  the  changes  to 
weariness,  let  us  convert  our  milk  into  choc- 
olate by  adding: — 

Starch- 
Proteins     Fats         sugars     Total 

Sugar,  i  02.  58  58 

Chocolate  12.  57.5         20.5         90 


126    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

Or  for  the  entire  meal: — 

Starch- 
Proteins       Fats         sugars    Total 

Calories  78.8       271.9       375-3       726 

Per  cents  10.8         37.4         51.7 

In  other  words,  any  meal  of  bread  with 
butter  or  jam,  and  any  of  the  ordinary  drinks 
from  water  to  thick  chocolate,  is  without  any 
taking  thought  whatever,  already  balanced 
as  to  its  proteins.  An  ounce  of  butter  is 
"isodynamic"  with  a  little  less  than  two  and 
a  half  ounces  of  jam  or  marmalade  —  and 
this  is  just  about  the  ratio  in  which  the  child 
of  nature  spreads  them.  All  jam,  therefore, 
in  place  of  all  butter,  will  merely  shift  114 
calories  from  the  "Fat"  column  to  the 
"Starch-sugars,"  and  drop  the  proportion  of 
fat  near  or  well  under  the  normal  fifth  —  3.6 
per  cent,  10.6, 17.4,  and  21.4  for  the  four  meals 
in  order.  Evidently,  then,  a  butterless  meal 
needs  cream,  chocolate,  or  some  other  form  of 
fat. 

The  more  elaborate,  "American"  breakfast 
figures :  — 


FIGURING  A  DIETARY          127 

Starch- 
Proteins       Fats        sugars    Total 

1  orange  6.5  3.5         90          100 
5  oz.  breakfast  food  with 

cream  and  sugar  II  34  55           100 

2  eggs,  4  oz.  60  1 20  1 80 
2 J  oz.  bread  and  butter  18.6  64.4  126          209 
I  cup  coifee  with  cream 

and  sugar  10  40  50          100 

Calories  106.1        261.9       321          689 

Per  cents  15.4         38  46.6 

The  obvious  effect  of  the  customary  two 
eggs  is  to  jump  the  proteins  from  the  Chit- 
tenden  standard  of  the  "Continental"  break- 
fast to  the  Voit  standard.  Otherwise  this  more 
elaborate  meal  does  not  differ  appreciably 
from  the  simpler  one. 

Our  American  breakfast  formula  seems  to 
be  (i)  some  sort  of  fruit  to  liven  the  appetite; 
(2)  something  with  sugar  and  cream  to  deaden 
it;  (3)  something  to  eat.  The  net  result  is 
about  the  same  as  the  European  practice  of 
taking  something  to  eat  to  start  with  and 
letting  it  go  at  that. 

A  single  case  will  be  sufficient  illustration 
from  the  meals  other  than  breakfast:  — 


128    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

Starch- 
Proteins        Fats      sugars       Total 

Beef  tongue,  I  Ib.  370  370  740 

Bread,  8  oz.                             74.4  29.6  504  608 

Spinach,  3  Ibs.  13  oz.  152.5  48.8  225.7  427 

Olive  oil,  2  oz.  527  527 

Potatoes,  I  Ib.  7  oz.               60  7  486  553 

Butter,  i  oz.  225  225 

Flour,  2  oz.                             18.4  7.4  178.2  204 

Skimmed  milk,  I  pt.              64  13  93  170 

Cookies,  3  oz.                         27  120  213  360 

Coffee  jelly,  sugar,  6  oz.                 696  696 

Calories  766.3  1347.8  2395.9  45IO 

Per  cents                                17  30.  53. 

Here,  then,  is  an  entirely  "random"  meal, 
the  cook  serving  what  was  handy,  and  six 
hungry  campers  eating  what  they  liked.  Yet 
the  fats  are  about  as  close  to  theory  as  taking 
thought  would  have  made  them,  while  the 
total  intake,  750  calories  for  each,  though 
somewhat  large,  is  not  excessive  for  the 
chief  meal  of  the  day.  But  the  proteins  are 
twice  the  Chittenden  standard  and  well  above 
the  Voit.  For  the  proteins  creep  in  every- 
where in  surprising  quantity  and  mount  up 
fast. 

Virtually  half  the  protein  of  this  meal  is  in 
the  meat.  Suppose,  then,  that  the  meat  had 


FIGURING  A  DIETARY          129 

been  left  out.    The  balance  would  then  be- 
come:— 

Starch- 
Proteins       Fats       sugars      Total 

Calories  396.3       977.8     2395.9     377° 

Per  cents  10.5         26  63.5 

In  other  words,  even  so  small  a  quantity  of 
meat  as  one  pound  in  a  meal  for  six  persons 
—  and  even  that  little  distinctly  fat  —  shoots 
the  proteins  well  above  even  the  Voit  stand- 
ard and  overtops  the  Chittenden  standard 
more  than  two  to  one.  As  anybody  may  prove 
for  himself  simply  by  trying  it,  in  a  meal  con- 
taining meat  or  fish,  only  extraordinary  pains 
will  keep  the  proteins  down  to  even  the  upper 
limit. 

In  addition  to  this  obvious  method  of  bal- 
ancing a  meal  or  a  dietary  by  simple  arith- 
metic, there  are  several  ingenious  devices 
which  make  use  of  printed  cards.  For  pro- 
fessional dietitians,  working  on  a  large  scale, 
these  save  time  —  after  one  has  mastered 
them. 

But  for  the  amateur  trencherman,  it  is  with 
the  ration  balance  as  with  the  total  energy  — 


130    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

the  main  thing  is  to  train  appetite  and  judg- 
ment, to  independence  of  cards  or  scales.  For 
most  of  us,  it  is  quite  enough,  when  in  doubt, 
to  keep  the  proteins  down  and  the  fats  up, 
and  now  and  again  to  figure  a  meal  or  two  to 
see  how  our  practice  conforms  to  theory.  Al- 
ways, nevertheless,  one  may  depart  far  from 
the  average  of  mankind,  or  from  his  own  usual 
practice,  and  still  be  right. 


XVII 

THE  GROWING  CHILD 

ONE  of  the  curious  things  about  a  baby 
is  the  amount  of  work  he  does.  The 
foetal  heart-beat  is  twice  as  rapid  as  that  of 
the  adult,  and  only  gradually  through  child- 
hood drops  down  to  the  grown-up  rate.  The 
lungs  of  youth  pump  to  correspond.  All  the 
bodily  processes  are  rapid.  The  tissues  are  all 
quick  capital,  growing  and  changing  and  fluid, 
not  salted  down  to  a  permanent  investment, 
like  the  bones  and  sinews  of  an  adult.  The 
child  is  very  much  alive,  and  makes  real  work 
of  his  living. 

In  other  words,  while  a  big  man  at  light 
labor  takes  sixteen  or  seventeen  calories  for 
each  pound  of  body  weight  and,  while  Mr. 
Horace  Fletcher  in  his  week  with  the  Yale 
crew  kept  his  below  ten,  thirty  calories  to  the 
pound  is  the  irreducible  minimum  for  an  in- 
fant, and  a  very  young  baby  demands  a  full 


132    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

forty-five.  A  child  under  ten  months  old  will 
actually  do  five  hundred  and  six  hundred 
calories  of  work  in  a  day,  and  add  a  full 
quarter  to  the  load  of  the  mother  who  nurses 
him.  Only  a  very  exceptional  man  —  a  runner 
in  a  long  race,  a  soldier  on  a  forced  march, 
a  refugee  fleeing  for  his  life  —  equals,  weight 
for  weight,  the  actual  day's  toil  of  a  helpless 
infant.  Not  till  some  time  after  he  dons  his 
first  "pants"  does  an  active  boy  drop  to  the 
level  of  a  hard-laboring  adult. 

Quite  erroneous,  therefore,  is  the  common 
impression  that  the  voracious  appetite  of 
childhood  is  due  to  any  special  call  for  food  to 
grow  on.  Increase  of  bulk  from  birth  to  ado- 
lescence does  not  amount  to  a  hundred  pounds 
in  fifteen  years  —  say  roughly,  a  hundred 
ounces  a  year.  A  tenth  of  an  ounce  dry  solids 
of  a  meal,  or  let  us  say  a  cup  of  milk  once  in 
four  days,  covers  amply  the  average  growth 
quota  from  infancy  up. 

To  be  sure,  a  very  little  baby  during  the  first 
weeks  of  life  does  grow  an  ounce  a  day.  But 
by  the  time  it  begins  to  sit  up  and  try  to  talk, 


THE  GROWING  CHILD          133 

the  increase  has  dropped  to  a  half  or  a  third 
of  an  ounce,  while  an  infant  of  nine  months 
may  take  four  hundred  and  eighty  calories  of 
milk  a  day,  use  up  four  hundred  and  twenty 
in  its  day's  work,  and  grow  the  other  sixty. 
Even  at  this  early  age,  therefore,  seven  eighths 
of  the  daily  intake  goes  into  "work"  and  only 
one  eighth  into  growth.  Cold  figures  give 
little  support  to  the  eat-to-grow  supersti- 
tion. 

Nor  is  there  more  basis  of  fact  for  the  gen- 
eral opinion  that  because  children  are  grow- 
ing they  need  an  extra  ration  of  "tissue-build- 
ing foods"  —  that  is  to  say,  of  proteins.  For, 
in  the  first  place,  if  we  dry  out  the  water, 
the  body  commonly  contains  more  of  either 
fat  or  bone  than  of  the  traditional  "tissue- 
builder,"  while  it  takes  some  six  times  as  much 
food  to  build  an  ounce  of  passive  fat  as  of 
working  muscle.  In  the  second  place,  an  in- 
fant, using  one  eighth  of  his  intake  for  growth, 
is  at  the  same  time  doing  twice  the  work, 
pound  for  pound,  as  a  grown  man,  and  should 
therefore  need  less  protein  in  proportion,  not 


134    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

more,  even  if  the  growth  were  all  muscle  In- 
stead of  more  than  half  fat  and  bone. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  a  baby  maintains  itself 
on  five  per  cent  proteins  and  ninety-five  per 
cent  sugar  and  cream,  and  grows  normally  on 
two  per  cent  more  of  protein,  making  seven 
in  all.  In  other  words,  the  human  infant  lives 
on  the  Siven  standard  and  thrives  on  the 
Chittenden,  leaving  to  his  elders  the  fourteen 
per  cent  proteins  of  the  Voit. 

Corresponding  to  this  low  protein  intake  of 
the  normal  baby,  the  milk  on  which  he  was 
intended  to  be  fed  has  only  from  seven  to  ten 
per  cent  of  its  total  energy  in  its  proteins. 
Cows'  milk,  to  be  sure,  has  twice  and  three 
times  this  amount  —  but  a  calf  grows  some 
twice  and  three  times  faster  than  a  baby. 
Puppies  and  kittens,  who  double  their  birth 
weight  during  their  first  week  of  life,  are  fed 
on  five  times  the  protein  of  slow-growing  man. 
In  other  words,  the  general  impression  that 
babies  and  children  need  much  "tissue-build- 
ing foods"  is  based  on  the  natural  food  of 
creatures  which  build  tissue  three,  four, 


THE  GROWING  CHILD          135 

twenty,  times  as  fast.  On  abundant  and  well- 
chosen  food,  a  human  being  may  well  main- 
tain throughout  life  the  eight  or  ten  per  cent 
of  proteins  on  which  Nature  and  Professor 
Chittenden  agree. 

The  proper  difference  between  a  child's 
food  and  a  man's  lies  in  the  fats.  Human  milk 
varies  greatly  with  the  age  of  the  infant  and 
the  general  health  of  the  mother.  Roughly, 
however,  it  splits  just  about  even  in  energy 
content  between  milk-sugar  and  fat,  or  virtu- 
ally forty-five  per  cent  of  each.  That  is  to  say, 
a  baby  does  about  half  its  living  on  fat,  as 
against  a  fifth  for  an  adult.  Nature,  in  short, 
starts  the  little  human  on  twice  as  much  fat 
as  he  will  handle  later.  Wisdom  suggests 
dropping  down  the  fat  intake  only  gradually 
to  the  adult  level. 

Incidentally,  one  may  note  that  there  is  no 
possible  way  of  "modifying"  cows'  milk  to 
make  it  fit  food  for  a  human  calf.  Au  naturel, 
it  contains  more  than  twice  too  much  protein, 
five  times  too  much  lime,  and  a  third  too  little 
sugar.  Dilute  with  two  or  three  parts  of  water 


136    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

to  make  the  proteins  right,  the  fat  and  sugar 
are  all  wrong.  Add  cream  and  milk-sugar,  and 
the  mineral  salts  are  still  off  —  too  much 
lime,  too  little  iron,  and  the  wrong  amount  in 
varying  degrees  of  six  other  portions  of  the 
"ash."  Moreover,  "protein"  of  the  formulas 
covers  a  half-dozen  actual  proteins,  which  are 
no  more  the  same  in  human  and  bovine  milk 
than  in  human  and  bovine  blood  or  muscle. 
No  wonder  there  are  districts  where,  of  babies 
fed  on  real  food,  only  fifteen  per  cent  die;  and 
of  babies  fed  on  imitations,  only  fifteen  per 
cent  live! 

Speaking,  then,  in  very  round  numbers, 
we  may  properly  hold  our  proteins  nearly 
steady  through  life  at  about  one  tenth  the 
total  intake,  while  between  babyhood  and 
voting  age  we  drop  the  fats  from  two  fifths  to 
one  fifth,  and  take  up  all  the  slack  with  the 
starches  and  sugars.  We  keep  going  for  the 
first  few  days  of  existence  on  some  one  hundred 
and  fifty  calories  a  day,  and  touch  three  hun- 
dred before  we  are  two  weeks  old.  A  weaned 
child  is  running  seven  hundred.  At  nine  years 


THE  GROWING  CHILD  137 

of  age  he  needs  half  the  food  of  most  adults. 
At  twelve,  he  demands  fifteen  hundred  calo- 
ries, and  can  be  persuaded  to  eat  more.  After 
sixteen  he  becomes  virtually  a  small  adult, 
with  no  special  quality  due  to  his  youth. 

In  the  light  of  these  figures,  it  is  by  no 
means  certain  that  all  carefully  reared  chil- 
dren really  get  enough  to  eat.  Too  much  thin 
stuff,  —  fruit,  cereals,  milk,  potatoes,  eggs, 
fish,  meat  from  which  every  bit  of  fat  has  been 
carefully  dissected  out;  too  little  bread  and 
butter,  cookies,  crackers,  cakes,  candy,  jam, 
and  olive  oil,  may  form  a  diet  with  too  little 
energy  for  its  bulk.  A  child's  food  needs  to  be 
easier  to  digest  than  an  adult's;  but  it  should 
be  more  rather  than  less  nutritious. 


XVIII 

OF  CERTAIN  SPECIAL  DIETS 

THERE  is  a  story  told  of  a  certain  victim 
of  "oil  dropsy"  who  consulted  a  famous 
authority  on  the  affliction,  and  received  the 
customary  lists  of  viands  which  he  might  and 
might  not  eat.  Unfortunately,  he  interchanged 
the  two,  and  ate  steadily  away  on  the  fatten- 
ing foods  which  he  was  supposed  to  shun  and 
carefully  avoided  everything  that  he  was  sup- 
posed to  take. 

Nevertheless,  he  whittled  down  his  outline 
and  got  back  his  figure.  With  half  the  things 
he  liked  forbidden  him,  he  had  simply  eaten 
less.  Intake  dropped  below  outgo,  and  the 
man  lived  on  his  capital  until  his  reserve  came 
down  to  normal. 

For  there  is,  of  course,  no  such  thing  as  a 
"fattening  food."  The  desk-worker  who,  as 
he  passes  forty  years,  begins  to  neglect  his 
exercise,  the  laboring-man  who  gets  a  place 


OF  CERTAIN  SPECIAL  DIETS     139 

on  the  police  force,  the  mother  who  puts  her 
child  on  solid  food  and  no  longer  has  to  fur- 
nish seven  hundred  calories  a  day,  all,  if  they 
are  not  careful,  put  more  food  into  their 
mouths  than  they  burn  in  their  muscles.  The 
excess  results,  as  a  logician  would  say,  in  an 
undistributed  middle. 

It  all  comes  down,  therefore,  with  healthy 
people,  to  Micawber's  old  formula,  twenty 
shillings  a  week  income  and  nineteen  outgo. 
We  put  two  thousand  calories  of  foodstuffs 
into  the  blood-stream,  and  we  take  out  nine- 
teen hundred  in  work.  The  other  hundred 
calories  piles  up.  It  does  not  make  the  slight- 
est difference  where  it  came  from. 

All  flesh-reducing  diets,  therefore,  involve 
mild  starvation.  We  leave  off  potatoes,  bread, 
vegetables,  and  the  like,  which  are  somewhat 
tasteless  and  of  which  we  have  been  eating 
more  than  we  realize.  One  can  easily  nibble 
a  hundred  calories  of  bread  absent-mindedly 
between  courses.  We  also  leave  off  desserts 
of  various  sorts,  pies,  puddings,  sweets,  which 
are  apt  to  be  pretty  nutritious,  and  certain 


140    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

to  be  eaten  after  we  have  really  had  enough 
already.  Sometimes  we  are  told  to  leave  off 
fats,  on  the  ground  that  they  are  nutritious. 
Sometimes  we  are  ordered  to  take  them  be- 
cause they  spoil  our  appetite  for  other  things. 

Banting's  famous  method  pushed  this  gen- 
eral idea  to  the  limit.  He  put  his  patients  on 
lean  meat.  Now,  lean  meat,  to  begin  with,  is 
worth  only  some  six  or  eight  hundred  calories 
to  the  pound.  It  has,  in  addition,  so  marked  a 
flavor  that  it  soon  kills  the  appetite;  as  much 
as  a  quarter  of  its  energy  may  go  to  waste 
heat;  and  finally,  the  fiber  of  even  the  best 
is  so  rubbery  that  no  human  jaw  can  possi- 
bly chew  enough  for  its  owner  to  live  on.  So 
Banting  got  his  patient  four  ways  at  once,  and 
promptly  starved  him  into  shape. 

Von  Noorden's  much  more  scientific  regime 
is  worth  giving  in  full:  — 

Eight  o'clock:  three  ounces  of  lean  cold  meat, 
one  ounce  of  bread,  one  cup  of  tea  with  a 
spoonful  of  milk  but  no  sugar. 

Ten  o'clock:  one  egg. 

Twelve  o'clock:  one  cup  of  strong  meat  broth. 


OF  CERTAIN   SPECIAL  DIETS     141 

One  o'clock:  a  small  plate  of  meat  soup  flavored 
with  vegetables,  six  ounces  of  lean  meat  or 
fish,  three  and  a  half  ounces  of  potatoes  with 
lettuce,  the  same  weight  of  fresh  fruit  without 
sugar. 

Three  o'clock:  cup  of  black  coffee. 

Four  o'clock:  seven  and  a  half  ounces  of  fresh 
fruit. 

Six  o'clock:  a  half-pint  of  milk,  with  tea  if  de- 
sired. 

Eight  o'clock:  four  and  a  half  ounces  of  meat 
either  cold  or  hot,  with  pickles,  radishes  or 
salad,  an  ounce  of  Graham  bread,  and  two  or 
three  spoonfuls  of  cooked  fruit  without  sugar. 

The  eight  meals  a  day  keeps  the  patient 
from  becoming  faint,  although  the  ration  fig- 
ures out  only  about  sixteen  hundred  calories, 
of  which  nearly  half  is  in  the  meat. 

The  other  five  hundred  or  more,  the  patient 
takes  out  of  his  own  fat.  Counting  this  as 
worth  four  thousand  calories  to  the  pound,  he 
should,  of  course,  lose  at  least  two  ounces  a 
day. 

Oertel's  dietary  is  still  more  rigid.  He  allows 
only  three  meals,  with  afternoon  tea,  and  cuts 
the  total  intake  below  twelve  hundred  cal- 


142    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

ories,  of  which  meat  and  eggs  comprise  more 
than  half. 

In  other  words,  the  fat  man  and  the  man  in 
condition  follow  opposite  policies.  The  one 
keeps  his  proteins  fairly  low,  but  makes  sure 
that  his  total  calories  are  well  up.  The  other 
keeps  his  total  calories  down  below  his  real 
needs,  so  that  he  shall  do  part  of  his  day's 
work  on  his  own  too  abundant  flesh.  But 
he  keeps  his  proteins  well  up,  so  that  the 
wasting  shall  come  on  his  reserve  of  fat,  not 
on  his  living  tissues. 

As  there  are  no  special  "fattening  foods" 
to  be  avoided  by  the  too  rotund,  so  there  are 
none  to  be  sought  by  the  over-spare.  Here 
again  it  is  simply  a  question  of  total  calories 
in  and  total  calories  out.  We  gain  flesh,  then, 
by  dodging  the  bulky  innutritious  foods  which 
fill  the  stomach  with  cellulose  and  water,  the 
indigestible  viands  which  fail  to  reach  the 
blood-stream  at  all,  and  the  too  pronounced 
flavors  that  kill  the  appetite.  One  can  add 
calories,  as  cod  liver  oil,  or  malted  milk,  or 
any  one  of  some  score  of  special  foods.  The 


OF  CERTAIN   SPECIAL  DIETS     143 

obvious  device  is  to  get  outside  another  slice 
of  bread  and  butter.  In  short,  the  proper 
diet  for  an  over-lean  adult  is  much  like  that 
for  a  growing  child,  nutritious,  digestible,  ap- 
petizing, and  somewhat  carefully  balanced. 

Three  other  classes  of  men  may  in  theory  do 
better  on  the  over-balanced,  high-protein  diet 
of  the  fat  and  scant  of  breath. 

The  convalescent  from  a  wasting  disease 
has  been  spending  his  tissues  riotously.  A 
high  fever  may  cost  six  or  eight  hundred  calo- 
ries a  day  above  the  maintenance  level  of 
health,  and  on  a  diet  that  does  not  reach  half 
the  starvation  minimum.  No  small  part  of  the 
difference  has  to  be  taken  out  of  the  muscles; 
hence  comes  the  ravenous  appetite  of  couch 
and  steamer  chair,  and  the  hunger  for  pro- 
teins to  build  anew  lost  protoplasm.  Here  the 
special  call  is  for  the  "high-grade"  proteins  of 
meat,  eggs,  milk,  rice,  and  potatoes,  which 
give  the  full  list  of  amino-acids  and  in  the  best 
proportion. 

In  certain  ways  like  that  of  the  convales- 
cent, is  the  case  of  the  overworked  man,  or 


144    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

let  us  say,  the  sedentary  worker  who  takes  a 
strenuous  vacation  without  waiting  to  get 
into  condition.  The  regular  hard  worker,  as 
we  have  seen,  should  have  a  diet  somewhat 
low  in  proteins  and  distinctly  high  in  fats. 
But  the  ill-conditioned  worker  will  not  digest 
an  excess  of  fats,  while  his  unused  muscles, 
instead  of  feeding  themselves  economically 
out  of  the  blood,  tend,  apparently,  to  "go 
stale"  and  spend  their  own  protoplasm.  Gen- 
eral experience  is,  therefore,  that  a  student 
athlete  going  into  training,  a  desk-worker 
shifting  to  hobnails  or  snowshoes,  will  best 
protect  his  unaccustomed  muscles  with  liberal 
protein  and  sugar,  and  take  on  only  slowly  the 
proper  laboring  diet.  Sugar,  especially  the 
fruit  sugars,  which  do  not  have  to  be  digested, 
are  traditionally  the  best  quick  meal  for  an 
exhausted  muscle.  The  proteins  are  in  some 
ways  even  better. 

Finally,  there  is  the  slender  person  who  has 
to  face  unaccustomed  cold.  In  the  long  run, 
to  be  sure,  the  fats  are  the  richest  store  of 
warmth,  as  of  other  forms  of  energy.  But  for 


OF  CERTAIN   SPECIAL  DIETS     145 

a  few  unwonted  hours,  the  "specific  dynamic 
action  "of  all  proteins  when  the  amino  group 
splits  off,  and  the  special  stimulus  to  the  heat 
centers  of  two  or  three  of  them,  are  a  great  com- 
fort to  chilly  bones.  For  this,  all  proteins,  high- 
grade  or  low,  are  equally  good,  even  to  the 
gelatin  of  soup  and  the  zein  of  corn-meal  mush. 
In  all  this,  however,  we  touch  a  field  that 
belongs  rather  to  individual  experience  and 
to  medicine  than  to  the  general  theory  of 
nutrition. 


M 


XIX 

THE  CASE  FOR  THE  VEGETARIAN 
UCH  of  the  argument  for  vegetarian- 


ism and  against  it  is  simply  de  gustibus, 
and  therefore  non  disputandum.  Some  persons 
there  be  who  simply  do  not  like  meat,  as  others 
do  not  care  for  olives  or  do  not  take  sugar  on 
their  lettuce.  All  that  one  can  say,  imper- 
sonally, on  this  point  is  that  the  extractives 
which  give  the  taste  to  meats  are,  in  general, 
so  much  more  powerful  flavors  than  the  es- 
sential oils  which  occur  in  other  foodstuffs, 
that  the  more  delicate  essences  are  completely 
swamped,  much  as  all  subtlety  of  color  dis- 
appears in  the  glare  of  a  bright  day.  The 
palate,  therefore,  becomes  tuned  to  a  some- 
what limited  number  of  violent  flavors,  which 
in  time  become  monotonous.  Notoriously,  one 
cannot  eat  quail  every  day  for  a  month. 

On  the  other  hand,  general  testimony  is 
that,  with  the  omission  of  the  highly  flavored 


THE  CASE  FOR  THE  VEGETARIAN    147 

extractives  of  the  meats,  a  vastly  greater 
number  of  delicate  essential  oils  make  their 
appearance,  like  out-of-door  colors  in  the  rain. 
Many  persons,  certainly,  whose  palates  have 
become  tuned  to  the  volatile  oils  find  the  more 
conventional  diet  ill-flavored  and  uninterest- 
ing. All  this,  however,  is  only  a  matter  of 
taste  —  and  cooks. 

Many  vegetarians,  of  course,  have  conscien- 
tious scruples  against  devouring  their  fellow 
vertebrates.  Many,  also,  are  squeamish  over 
the  series  of  unappetizing  processes  which  lie 
between  ranch  or  coop  or  landing-net  and  the 
dining-table.  With  all  such  considerations  we 
have  here  nothing  to  do. 

The  real  strength  of  the  vegetarian  argu- 
ment lies  in  its  arithmetic.  The  proteins  of 
a  well-to-do  diet  commonly  add  up  to  about 
twice  what  they  should.  Practically,  we  cannot 
drop  out  the  vegetable  proteins,  because  they 
come  along,  here  a  little  and  there  a  little, 
mixed  in  with  the  starches  and  sugars.  One 
obvious  way  to  keep  the  proteins  down  is  to 
drop  out  the  fish,  flesh,  and  fowl  —  and,  in- 


148    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

cidentally,  various  waste  poisons  which  have 
not  the  merit  of  being  also  foods. 

On  the  other  hand,  there  is  the  possible 
danger  that  on  a  strictly  vegetarian  diet  the 
proteins  may  be  run  down  too  low.  We  have 
already  seen  that  the  proteins  of  corn  and 
wheat  are  not  economical  sources  of  the  par- 
ticular amino-acids  which  we  human  beings 
happen  to  want.  A  very  strict  and  conscien- 
tious vegetarian,  therefore,  moved  by  a  zeal 
that  is  not  in  accordance  with  either  knowl- 
edge or  instinct,  might  hit  upon  a  combina- 
tion of  foodstuffs  that  would  leave  him  decid- 
edly short,  let  us  say,  of  lysin  or  tryptophan. 
Whether  such  an  accident  ever  has  really  oc- 
curred is,  of  course,  another  matter. 

Furthermore,  it  would  be  quite  possible,  in 
theory,  to  take  so  much  of  the  woody  fiber 
of  carrots  and  beets  and  parsnips  as  to  check 
seriously  the  absorption  of  the  nutrients  entan- 
gled in  the  mesh.  The  thing  has  been  done  ex- 
perimentally —  and  in  argument  one  is  fancy 
free. 

A  real  danger,  however,  of  a  strictly  vege- 


THE  CASE  FOR  THE  VEGETARIAN    149 

tarian  diet  is  a  shortage  of  fats.  Nuts  and 
olive  oil  are  the  two  available  sources  of  this 
highly  important  stuff  —  and  both  are  ex- 
pensive. The  rigid  vegetarian,  therefore, 
oddly  enough,  may  find  himself  in  the  same 
situation  with  the  slum  dweller  who  lives  on 
bread  and  tea,  and  buys  for  meat  only  liver, 
fish,  and  other  lean  tissue.  Both  run  the  chance 
of  being  undernourished. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  ninety-nine 
in  the  hundred  of  self-styled  "vegetarians" 
are  not  vegetarians  at  all.  To  be  sure,  they 
eschew  such  animal  tissue  as  muscle,  gland, 
and  fat  but  they  count  as  "vegetables,"  but- 
ter, eggs,  cheese,  and  milk.  Now  butter,  eggs, 
cheese,  and  milk  are  simply  meat  without  the 
flavor  —  and  especially  valuable  meats  at 
that.  With  these  ad  libitum,  there  is  not  the 
slightest  danger  of  running  short  of  either 
proteins  or  fat,  while  their  amino-acids  do  not 
differ  appreciably  from  those  of  muscle.  In 
other  words,  the  actual  "vegetarian"  is  sim- 
ply a  person  who  cuts  out  certain  kinds  of 
meat  —  the  easiest  way,  on  the  whole,  to 


ISO    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

keep  down  the  protein  intake  to  the  proper 
level. 

But  if  butter,  eggs,  cheese,  and  milk  are  to 
count  as  vegetables,  one  might  as  well  go  a 
step  farther,  utilize  the  cheap  fats  of  mutton 
and  pork,  and  without  commonly  taking  lean 
muscle  "straight,"  employ  it  for  flavoring 
in  chowders,  stews,  and  the  like.  In  other 
words,  what  runs  up  both  the  proteins  and 
the  price  beyond  reason  is  not  eating  meat, 
but  relying  on  meat  for  any  large  part  of  our 
day's  energy.  To  buy  meat  for  its  fat,  and  to 
use  the  lean  to  help  out  the  taste  of  vegetables 
and  flour,  as  we  eat  our  ha'penny  worth  of 
cheese  with  an  intolerable  deal  of  spaghetti, 
is  to  seize  upon  all  the  real  advantages  of  a 
" vegetarian"  regimen  without  its  drawbacks. 
Just  this,  year  by  year,  an  increasing  number 
of  persons  are  actually  doing. 

Curiously  enough,  this  practice  is  really  a 
return  to  the  immemorial  diet  of  our  race, 
which,  for  better  or  worse,  has  helped  to 
make  us  what  we  are.  In  prehistoric  times, 
and  all  down  through  the  Middle  Ages,  while 


THE  CASE  FOR  THE  VEGETARIAN    151 

a  small  group  of  great  nobles  and  upper  clergy 
feasted  on  venison  and  capons,  the  great  mass 
of  laborers,  artisans,  farmers,  merchants,  and 
fighting  men,  who  were  making  civilization, 
lived  on  bread,  cheese,  butter,  porridge,  cakes, 
and  the  products  of  their  gardens,  while  the 
peoples  of  southern  Europe  had,  in  addition, 
chestnuts  and  olive  oil.  They  had  almost  no 
meat,  "but  it  be  seldom  a  little  lard"  or 
the  "bit  o'  bacon  of  a  Sunday."  They  raised 
pork  and  mutton  a  good  deal  for  the  sake  of 
the  fat,  and  took  the  lean  somewhat  as  a  by- 
product. 

Abundant  lean  beef,  in  other  words,  is  a 
new  idea.  It  came  in  with  cheap  freights  on 
the  railways  and  the  rise  of  the  great  grazing 
countries  overseas.  Nomadic  barbarian  tribes 
have  always  lived  on  flesh,  but  our  own  cur- 
rent habit  of  eating  meat  three  times  a  day  is 
less  than  a  hundred  years  old.  With  the  gen- 
eral increase  in  wealth,  the  practices  which 
were  once  confined  to  a  small  group  of  the 
upper  classes  have  spread  through  society. 
Lean  meat  has  replaced  cheese  as  the  great 


152    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

source  of  protein,  and  the  poor  man  enjoys 
the  diet  which  once  belonged  to  the  rich  alone. 
Meanwhile,  the  more  intelligent  and  well- 
to-do  classes,  after  three  generations  of  error, 
are  returning  to  the  ancient  diet  of  their  peo- 
ple. To-day,  many  a  professional  man  eats 
less  meat  and  spends  less  money  on  his  table 
than  a  well-paid  workingman  with  a  third 
his  income.  The  "European  breakfast,"  the 
"vegetarian"  restaurant,  Professor  Chitten- 
den,  Mr.  Horace  Fletcher,  the  college-bred 
women  who  do  their  own  cooking,  are  all 
signs  of  the  times.  Let  us  hope  that  too  many 
"ists"  and  "arians"  will  not  make  a  whole- 
some tendency  ridiculous. 


XX 

THE  LIMITS  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

SO  far  as  the  problem  of  human  nutrition 
is  a  problem  in  energetics,  its  solution  is 
complete.  We  now  know  where  the  day's 
work  comes  from,  and  where  it  goes  to,  how 
much  there  is  of  it,  and  most  of  the  important 
steps  by  the  way.  We  know  that  the  Law  of 
the  Conservation  of  Energy  holds  for  the 
human  machine  as  absolutely  as  the  Law  of 
Gravitation  for  the  celestial  mechanism.  We 
may,  therefore,  trust  Bulletin  Twenty-eight  as 
we  trust  the  Nautical  Almanac  —  the  differ- 
ence between  them  is  not  in  the  soundness  of 
the  underlying  theory,  but  in  the  number  of 
decimal  places  in  the  data. 

We  are,  then,  no  longer  at  the  mercy  of 
old-fashioned  persons  who  want  to  feed  us  on 
beef  extract,  of  new-fashioned  persons  who  are 
sure  that  other  people  eat  too  much,  of  blind 
guides  who  advise  us  in  print,  of  advertisers 


154    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

of  food  drinks  and  magic  mixtures  guaranteed 
to  contain  more  nutriment  than  the  sum  of 
all  their  ingredients.  We  have  only  to  look  up 
the  facts,  and  know.  With  butcher  and  baker 
and  boniface,  with  anxious  relative  and  per- 
suasive salesman,  we  may  at  last  deal  on  the 
basis  of  certainty. 

When,  however,  we  turn  from  the  work 
aspect  of  our  daily  food  to  the  structure  of  the 
working  instrument,  we  find  ourselves  on  a 
footing  much  less  sure.  Science  itself  does  not 
understand  the  salts  and  the  proteins  in  any 
such  wise  as  it  knows  the  starches,  the  sugars, 
and  the  fats.  We  have  yet  discovered  neither 
all  the  parts  of  our  protoplasmic  engine,  nor  in 
full  how  the  parts  which  we  do  know  fit  into 
one  another.  For  this  side  of  the  problem  of 
nutrition  there  is  no  printed  text  to  which  any 
one  may  turn  as  to  Bulletin  Twenty-eight,  the 
Almanac,  and  the  Dictionary. 

No  eater  of  foodstuffs,  then,  can  possibly 
keep  track  of  a  dozen  amino-acids  and  another 
dozen  inorganic  salts.  The  most  that  Science 
can  advise,  practically,  is  the  shotgun  method 


THE  LIMITS  OF  KNOWLEDGE     155 

—  a  sufficient  variety  to  make  sure  that,  one 
thing  with  another,  it  covers  all  the  ground. 
We  limit  the  range  of  our  foods  at  our  peril. 
We  take  chance  of  trouble  when  our  total  pro- 
teins drop  much  below  a  tenth  of  the  energy 
content,  or  when  we  miss  for  more  than  a  day 
or  two  some  fresh  or  uncooked  food. 

On  the  other  hand,  enough  is  rather  better 
than  a  feast;  so  that  there  is  no  use  in  hunt- 
ing round  for  more  phosphates  or  iron,  or  in 
running  up  the  proteins  above,  let  us  say, 
fifteen  per  cent.  Yet  even  the  high  protein 
diet  of  these  United  States,  pace  certain  dietetic 
calamity-howlers,  commonly  does  less  harm  to 
the  body  than  to  the  pocketbook. 

Of  one  thing,  however,  Science  is  sure.  The 
digestion  and  assimilation  of  the  food  is  an 
extraordinarily  complex  and  delicate  process, 
which  is  easily  thrown  out  of  gear.  Each  step, 
if  it  is  to  be  managed  successfully,  depends  on 
the  end-products  of  the  one  before  —  and  the 
cooking  is  part  of  the  digestion.  Our  direct 
voluntary  control  of  our  nutrition  begins, 
therefore,  in  the  kitchen  and  ends  in  the 


156    NUTRITION  OF  A  HOUSEHOLD 

mouth.  Whatever  goes  wrong  between  the 
dealer's  shelves  and  the  top  of  the  gullet  is 
our  own  fault. 

Beyond  this,  our  control  is  indirect,  through 
our  permanent  habits  and  our  temporary 
mental  states.  If  we  eat  when  we  are  cross  or 
over-tired,  if  we  hurry,  if  we  talk  of  disagree- 
able matters  and  scold  the  children  at  table, 
we  risk  letting  sundry  calories  of  energy  get 
by  unused,  and  putting  sundry  hurtful  com- 
pounds where  they  should  not  be.  Pavlov's 
"appetite  juice"  explains  why  the  dinner  of 
herbs  with  contentment  may  contribute  more 
nutrients  to  the  blood-stream  than  the  stalled 
ox  eaten  with  a  disturbed  mind. 

Ancient  experience  and  modern  science 
agree,  then,  on  this :  We  need  abundant  food, 
enough  to  cover  our  living  expenses  and  our 
work — and  no  more.  We  need  good  food, 
in  the  sense  that  it  shall  be  fresh,  and  well 
cooked,  and  appetizing,  and  not  more  indi- 
gestible than  the  eater  can  stand.  Most  of  us, 
on  the  whole,  do  best  on  the  ancient  staple 
foods  on  which  our  race  has  grown  strong 


THE  LIMITS  OF  KNOWLEDGE     157 

since  the  Glacial  Period,  with  but  cautious 
excursions  into  the  new  and  unproved.  No 
food  is  good  of  itself,  but  only  as  it  fits  other 
foodstuffs  and  the  eater.  For  most  normal 
people  it  is  quite  enough  to  eat  at  leisure,  with 
a  clear  conscience  and  a  quiet  mind,  what  one 
likes  and  knows  he  can  digest  —  and  when  in 
doubt,  to  follow  Science. 

Beyond  this,  nothing  really  matters,  and  all 
good  foods  are  equally  good. 


THE  END 


APPENDIX 


APPENDIX 

DAILY  FOOD  REQUIREMENT  FOR  PERSONS  AT 
LIGHT  WORK— RUBNER  STANDARD 

RUBNER'S  standard  is  larger  than  Chittenden's  and 
smaller  than  Voit's  and  Atwater's.  Persons  at  light  work 
include  children  at  school,  professional  men,  desk  and 
office  workers,  salesmen,  typists,  tailors  and  seamstresses, 
women  doing  the  lighter  parts  of  housekeeping,  and  the 
like.  For  moderately  hard  work  such  as  that  of  a  farmer  or 
mechanic,  for  an  athlete  in  training,  for  a  woman  at  full 
housework,  and  for  a  nursing  mother,  add  five  hundred 
calories.  For  very  heavy  muscular  work,  add  one  thou- 
sand. 

These  figures  are  averages  for  normal  persons.  They 
assume  an  ordinarily  wholesome  mixed  diet,  and  allow  a 
reasonable  factor  of  safety  over  the  theoretic  optimum. 
A  departure  of  two  hundred  calories  either  way  is  about  the 
limit  for  personal  idiosyncrasy. 

Body  weight  Calories  of  Body  weight  Calories  of 

in  pounds  food  per  day  in  pounds  food  per  day 

190                          3015  100  1985 

180                          2910  90  1855 

170                          2835  80  1710 

160                          2705  70  1565 

150                          2600  60  1410 

140                          2485  50  1250 

130                          2370  40  1075 

120  2240  30  890 

no  2115  ao  680 


162  APPENDIX 

PER  CENT  OF  TOTAL  ENERGY  IN  VARIOUS 

DIETS  DERIVED  FROM  PROTEINS 

AND  FROM  FATS 

Proteins  Fats 

Siven's  minimum 5 

Chittenden's  standard 8 

Starvation  metabolism 13  87 

Voit's  standard  for  medium  work 15  18 

Voit's  standard  for  hard  work 17  26 

Human  milk 7.4  44 

Cow's  milk 21.3  50 

Maine  lumberman 8.3  44 

Poor  Hindoos 9  10 

Finnish  peasants 15  21 

Well-paid  workmen  in  Western  Europe 1 6  17 

Well-to-do  Americans 19  30 

Eskimos 44  48 


TABLES  FOR  ESTIMATING  AND  COMPUTING 
THE  NUTRIENTS  OF  COMMON  FOODS 

Column  one,  Per  cent  of  Water,  serves  to  distinguish  be- 
tween the  obvious  bulk  of  any  food  and  the  actual  nutri- 
ents in  it,  and  permits  the  estimate  of  price  or  intake  by 
reality  instead  of  by  appearance. 

Column  two,  Calories  in  each  Pound,  gives  the  fuel  values. 
From  the  weight  of  foods  actually  eaten,  may  be  figured,  by 
simple  addition,  the  total  intake  for  a  single  meal,  or  the 
ration  for  a  day,  week,  or  month,  of  a  single  individual,  of 
a  family,  or  of  any  other  group.  A  standard  for  comparison 
is  given  in  the  table,  Daily  Food  Requirement  for  Persons  at 
Light  Work.  In  the  same  way  can  be  computed  from  its 
ingredients  the  nutritive  value  of  any  special  dish  not  given 
here,  or  of  any  other  standard  portion. 

The  data  of  both  these  columns  are  taken  directly  from 
Bulletin  28,  and  are  all  for  raw  foods,  unless  otherwise 


APPENDIX  163 

stated,  and  include  food  actually  eaten  without  allowance 
for  waste  or  refuse. 

Column  three,  Calories  in  each  Ounce,  arises  by  dividing 
by  sixteen  the  figures  of  column  two.  It  is  for  convenience 
in  handling  small  quantities  or  avoiding  pounds. 

These  three  columns  together  cover  the  general  problem 
of  food  purchase  and  consumption. 

Columns  four,  five,  with  column  six  where  it  appears, 
Calories  of  energy  in  each  pound  contained  in  Proteins,  Fats, 
etc.,  are  computed  by  multiplying  the  corresponding  per- 
centages of  Bulletin  28  by  1860  for  the  proteins  and  car- 
bohydrates, and  by  4220  for  the  fats,  these  numbers  being 
the  fuel  values  per  pound  of  the  three  pure  foodstuffs  re- 
spectively. The  sum  of  the  three  is  always  the  total  calo- 
ries in  each  pound  of  column  two. 

These  three  columns  furnish  data  for  computing,  either 
in  calories  or  in  per  cents,  the  distribution  among  the  three 
main  foodstuffs  of  the  total  energy  of  any  ration  or  special 
dish.  Various  standards  for  comparison  appear  in  the 
table  entitled  Per  cent  of  Total  Energy  in  Various  Foods 
Derived  from  Proteins  and  Fats. 

The  two,  or  three,  columns  following  merely  give  the 
same  information  in  ounces  instead  of  pounds. 

The  last  two,  or  the  last  three,  columns,  Per  cent  of  total 
energy  contained  in  Proteins,  Fats,  etc.,  arise  by  dividing  the 
numbers  of  column  two  into  those  of  columns  four,  five,  and 
six.  This  portion  of  the  tables  cannot  ordinarily  be  used  for 
computation,  but  is  the  most  convenient  form  for  a  rough 
general  estimate  of  the  ration  balance. 


164  APPENDIX 

FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

FRESH    BEEF 

All  meats  contain  also  many  different  sorts  of  mineral  matter,  which 
commonly  average  about  one  per  cent. 


Per  cent  of 
water 


Calories  in 
each  pound 
560 
800 
1 200 
1600 

2OOO 


Calories  in 
each  ounce 

35 

50 

75 
100 
125 


Very  lean 73 

Lean 69 

Medium 60 

Fat 52 

Very  fat 44 

Average  cuts 

Shank 70  755                    47.2 

Shoulder 69  805                    50.4 

Round 68  835                   52.2 

Chuck  rib 67  920                    57.5 

Chuck 65  1005                   62. 6 

Hind  quarter 62  1130                    70. 6 

Fore  quarter 62  IJ35                   71- 

Side 62  1145                   71.6 

Loin 61  1155                   72.2 

Flank 59  1255                   78.4 

Rump 58  1325                   82.8 

Rib 57  1370                   85.6 

Plate 56  1450           .        90. 5 

Tripe 86  270                   17. 

Tongue 

Lean 70  740  46.2 

Fat 65  noo  68.7 

PRESERVED  BEEF 

Corned,  salted,  and  dried  meats  contain  less  water  than  fresh  ;  and  com- 
monly have  more  salts  up  to  about  five  per  cent.  Otherwise  they  are  like 
fresh  meats. 

Since,  however,  lean  pieces  are  more  commonly  smoked  and  dried,  and 
fat  pieces  corned  or  salted,  average  samples  are  : 

Per  cent  of        Calories  in        Calories  in 

water  each  pound       each  ounce 

Dried 54  840                    52.5 

Corned 54  1390  87. 

Salt. 37  2  no  132. 


APPENDIX  165 

FOR   COMPUTING   THE   RATION   BALANCE 


Calories 

of  energy 

Calories  of  energy 

Per  cent  of 

in  each  pound 

in  each  ounce 

total  energy 

contained  in 

contained 

in 

contained  in 

Proteins 

Fats 

Proteins 

Fats 

Proteins            Fats 

430 

130 

26.9 

8.1 

76                 24 

375 

425 

23-5 

26.5 

47                53 

340 

860 

21.3 

53-7 

28                72 

300 

1300 

18.8 

81.2 

19                81 

250 

1750 

15-7 

109.3 

13                87 

400 

355 

25. 

22.2 

53               47 

370 

435 

23.2 

27.2 

46               54 

39° 

445 

24.4 

27.8 

47               53 

355 

565 

22.2 

35-3 

38               62 

355 

650 

22.2 

40.4 

35               65 

360 

770 

22.5 

48.1 

32               68 

340 

795 

21.3 

49-7 

29               71 

350 

795 

21.9 

49-7 

31               69 

350 

805 

21.9 

50.3 

30               70 

360 

895 

22-5 

55  9 

28               72 

350 

975 

21.9 

60.9 

26                74 

33° 

1040 

20.  6 

65. 

24                76 

3^5 

1135 

19.7 

70.8 

22                     78 

215 

55 

13.5 

3-5 

80                     20 

360 

380 

22.5 

23.7 

47               53 

255 

845 

15.6 

53-1 

23               77 

565  275  35.3  17.2  67  33 
290  1 100  18.1  68.7  21  79 
235  1875  14.7  117.2  ii  89 


i66 


APPENDIX 


FOR    COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

FRESH    VEAL 

Since  veal  is  obtained  from  a  young  animal,  it  contains  more  water  than 
beef  and  less  fat. 


Very  lean. 
Lean .... 
Medium. . 

Fat 

Very  fat. . 


Per  cent  of        Calories  in        Calories  in 
water 

•  76 
74 
70 
62 
57 


Average  cuts 

Chuck 74 

Fore  quarter 72 

Hind  quarter 71 

Loin 70 

Flank 70 

FRESH  MUTTON 

Mutton  is  characteristically  fatter  than  beef. 

Per  cent  of 
water 

Lean 66 

Medium 55 

Fat 44 

Very  fat 30 

Average  cuts 

Hind  leg 63 

Shoulder 60 

Hind  quarter 55 

Fore  quarter 53 

Flank 43 


each  pound 

each  ounce 

500 

31.2 

600 

37-5 

755 

47-1 

1030 

64.4 

1350 

84.3 

610 

38.1 

710 

44-3 

735 

45-9 

790 

49-4 

910 

56.9 

Calories  in 

Calories  in 

each  pound 

each  ounce 

940 

58.8 

1490 

93.1 

2000 

125. 

27OO 

168.7 

1085 

67.8 

1245 

77-8 

'495 

93.2 

'595 

IOO. 

2065 

129. 

APPENDIX  167 

FOR   COMPUTING  THE   RATION  BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 

Calories  o 

f  energy 

Per  cent  of 

in  each  pound 

in  each 

ounce 

total  energy 

contained  in 

contained  in 

contained  in 

Proteins            Fata 

Proteins 

Fats 

Proteins            Fats 

416                  84 

26. 

5-*5 

83                 17 

387              211 

24.3 

13.2 

65                35 

375              380 

23-4 

23-75 

50                50 

355              675 

22.2 

42.2 

35               65 

335            io*5 

20.9 

63.4 

25               75 

365              *45 

22.8 

15-3 

60               40 

37*              338 

*3-*5 

21.  1 

52               48 

385              350 

24.1 

21.8 

52               48 

368              422 

23. 

26.4 

47                53 

374              536 

23.4 

33-5 

4i              59 

450 

59° 

21.9 

36-9 

37 

63 

320 

1170 

20. 

73.1 

22 

78 

300 

1700 

18.75 

106.25 

15 

«5 

170 

»53° 

10.6 

158.1 

6 

94 

347 

738 

21.7 

46.1 

3* 

68 

325 

920 

20.3 

57-5 

26 

74 

310 

1182 

19.4 

73-7 

21 

79 

287 

1308 

17.9 

81.9 

18 

82 

267 

1798 

16.7 

112.7 

*3 

87 

168 


APPENDIX 


FOR   CQMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

LAMB 

Lamb  is  leaner  and  more  watery  than  mutton,  but  fatter  than  veal. 

Per  cent  of       Calories  in        Calories  in 
water  each  pound      each  ounce 


Very  lean. 
Lean .... 
Medium. . 

Fat 

Very  fat. . 


Average  cuts 

Leg 

Side 


72 
68 
64 
58 
5* 


59 

58 


59° 

•  820 

1050 

1300 

1590 


1300 
1300 


36.9 

51.2 

65.6 

81.25 

99-4 

81.25 
81.25 


PORK 
Pork  is,  in  general,  the  fattest  of  meats. 


Per  cent  of       Calories  in        Calories  in 


Very  lean. 
Lean .... 
Medium  . 
Fat 

Very  fat. . 
Clear  fat  . 


Average  cuts 

Feet 

Shoulder  .  . 

Ham 

Side 

Clear  back . 


water 
66 
60 

40 
28 


55 
5' 

50 

^5 


each  pound 

900 
1200 
1600 

2200 
2830 
3780 


I4OO 
1690 
1700 
25OO 
2970 


each  ounce 
56.25 
75- 

100. 

137.5 
176.8 


87.5 

105.6 
106.25 

185.6 


Ham  and  bacon  have  more  salts  and  less  water  than  fresh  pork,  but  have 
about  the  same  nutrients  and  yield  substantially  the  same  amount  of  energy 
as  equally  fat  pieces  of  fresh  meat. 

Sausages  differ  widely  even  when  called  by  the  same  name.  Typical 
examples  are  : 

Per  cent  of       Calories  in        Calories  in 
water  each  pound      each  ounce 

Bologna 60  1090  68. 1 

Pork 40  2120  132.5 


APPENDIX  169 

FOR    COMPUTING   THE    RATION    BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 
contained  in 


Proteins 
465 
400 

350 
330 
310 


Fats 
125 
420 
700 
970 
1280 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 
contained  in 


Proteins 
29.1 

*5- 
21.9 

20.6 

19.4 


Fats 

7.8 
26.2 

43-7 
60.6 
80. 


346 
326 


954 
974 


21.6 

20.4 


59-6 
60.9 


370 

530 

*3-i 

33-1 

41 

59 

350 

850 

21.85 

53-1 

29 

7i 

300 

1300 

18.75 

81.25 

19 

Si 

250 

1950 

15.6 

121.9 

ii 

89 

no 

272O 

69 

170. 

4 

96 

70 

3710 

4.4 

231.9 

2 

98 

293 

1107 

18.3 

69-3 

21 

79 

247 

H43 

15-4 

90.2 

15 

85 

292 

1408 

18.25 

88.1 

17 

83 

170 

2330 

10.6 

145.6 

7   • 

93 

120 

2850 

7-5 

178.1 

4 

96 

350 
250 


740 
1870 


21.9 

15.6 


46.25 

116.9 


32 

12 


68 
88 


I70 


APPENDIX 


FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

FLESH  OTHER  THAN  MUSCLE  is  much  the  same  in  all  the 
domesticated  animals.  For  any  creature,  averages  are 

Per  cent  of        Calories  in  Calories  in 

water             each  pound  each  ounce 

Kidney 77                      5 10  31.9 

Brain 78                      600  37.5 

Liver1 70                      660  41. 

Heart 70                       830  51.9 

Gelatin 14                   1705  106.3 

CLEAR   FAT,  with  connective  tissue  but  no  lean  : 

Per  cent  of       Calories  in  Calories  in 

water             each  pound  each  ounce 

Beef  suet 13.7                354°  221.25 

Salt  pork 8.                   3670  219.4 

Mutton  suet 3.4               4060  253'75 

CLEAR   FAT  without  connective  tissue  : 

Per  cent  of       Calories  in  Calories  in 

water             each  pound  each  ounce 

Oleomargarine 9.5                3525  220.3 

Crude  lard 4.8                4010  250.6 

Refined  lard,  tallow,  etc 4220  263.75 

Butter  is  nearly  like  oleomargarine.  Olive  and  cotton  seed  oils  are  pure 
fats  like  lard  and  tallow. 

*  Liver  contains  a  carbohydrate,  glycogen,  amounting  on  the  average  to  60  calo- 
ries in  the  pound,  3.75  calories  to  the  ounce,  and  9  per  cent  of  the  total  energy. 
This  is  here  included  with  the  fats. 


APPENDIX  171 

FOR   COMPUTING   THE    RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 
contained  in 

Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 
contained  in 

Per  cent  of 
total  energy 
contained  in 

Proteins           Fats 

Proteins           Fats 

Proteins           Fats 

310              200 
i  So              420 

19.4              12.5 
11.25           26.25 

61               39 
30              70 

390              210 

3*5             5°5 
1700                 5 

24.4               13.1 
20.3               31.6 
106.                   .3 

59              42- 
39              61 

100 

So 

40 
30 


3460 
3630 
4030 


1.9 


216.25 

226.9 

251.9 


98 
99 
99 


45 
o 


35°3 
3965 
4220 


1.4 
2.8 


218.8 
247.8 
263.75 


99 
99 

100 


172  APPENDIX 


FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

POULTRY 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water           each  pound  each  ounce 

Chicken 75                   500  31.2 

Fowl 64                  1050  65.6 

Turkey 55                  1360  85. 

COOKED    MEATS 

Broiled  and  roasted  meats  lose  a  portion  of  their  water.  A  portion  of  the 
fat  also  is  either  lost  or  transferred  to  the  gravy.  Available  data  for  cooked 
meats  is  somewhat  unreliable. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water           each  pound  each  ounce 

Round  steak,  fat  removed 63                    840  52.5 

Broiled  tenderloin  steak 55                  1300  81.2 

Roast  beef. 48                  1620  101.2 

Boiled  beef  tongue 51                  1340  83.7 

Roast  mutton,  leg 51                  1420  88.7 

Roast  lamb,  leg 67                     900  56.2 

Broiled  lamb  chops 48                   1665  104. 

Ham,  rather  lean 50                  1300  81.2 

Deviled  ham,  canned 44                   1790  1 1 1 .9 

Roast  pork,  rib 34                  2050  128.1 

Quail 67                    775  48.4 

Fricasseed  chicken 67                     855  53.4 

Capon 60                     985  61.6 

Roastturkey 52                  I295  80.9 

One  sandwich,  200  to  400  calories 


APPENDIX  173 

FOR   COMPUTING   THE    RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 

in  each  pound 

contained  in 

Proteins  Fats 


400 
365 
390 


100 
685 
970 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 
contained  in 
Proteins 


25. 

22.8 

24.4 


Fats 
6.2 
42.8 
60.6 


Per  cent  of 
total  energy 
contained  in 
Proteins  Fats 

80  20 

35  65 

29  71 


5^0 

445 

330 
855 

400 

1220 

370 

970 

460 
360 
405 

960 

540 
1260 

425 

875 

355 
460 

1435 
1590 

410 

325 

500 

335 
485 
485 

5*5 

770 

31.9 

20.6 

27.8 

53-4 

*5- 

76.2 

23.1 

60.6 

28.7 

60. 

22.5 

33-7 

25-3 

78.7 

26.6 

54-7 

22.2 

89.7 

28.7 

99-4 

25.6 

20.9 

2O.3 

30-3 

31.2 

30-3 

32.8 

48.1 

61 

39 

34 

66 

25 

75 

28 

72 

3* 

68 

40 

60 

24 

76 

33 

67 

20 

80 

22 

78 

S3 

43 

38 

57 

51 

49 

40 

60 

174  APPENDIX 

FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

SOUPS   AND    STEWS 

These,  even  when  called  by  the  same  name,  vary  within  wide  limits. 
Average  samples  are  given  here.  The  flour  used  for  thickening,  the  various 
forms  of  starch  commonly  added,  together  with  some  glycogen  are  here  in- 
cluded with  the  fats. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in         Calories  in 
water  each  pound        each  ounce 

Bouillon,  consomme,  and  julienne      96  55  3.4 

Chicken 94  loo  6.2 

Beef. 93  120  7.5 

Chicken    gumbo,     mock    turtle, 

mulligatawny 89  185  1 1. 6 

Clam  chowder 89  195  12.2 

Oxtail 89  210  13.1 

Green  turtle 87  265  16.6 

Meat  stew 85  370  23.1 

Vegetable  soups,  pea,  bean,  cream 
of  celery,  asparagus,  etc.,  aver- 
age   86  250  15.6 


APPENDIX  175 

FOR   COMPUTING   THE    RATION   BALANCE 


Calories 

of  energy 

Calories  of  energy 

Per  cent  of 

in  eac 

h  pound 

in  each  ounce 

total  energy 

contained  in 

contained 

in 

contained  in 

Proteins 

Fats 

Proteins 

Fats 

Proteins           Fats 

38 

12 

2.4 

I. 

70                30 

57 

43 

3.6 

2.6 

57                43 

75 

45 

4-7 

2.8 

60                40 

93 

92 

5.8 

5.8 

50                50 

37 

138 

»•  3 

9.9 

29                71 

75 

135 

4-7 

8.4 

35              65 

112 

153 

7- 

9.6 

4*              54 

93 

277 

5.8 

17.3 

*5               75 

2.4 


176 


APPENDIX 


FOR   COMPUTING  TOTAL   RATION 

FRESH    FISH 

Per  cent  of  Calories  in        Calories  in 

water  each  pound       each  ounce 

Flounder 84  290  18.2 

Hake 83  315  19.7 

Cusk 82  325  20. 3 

Cod 83  325  20.3 

Haddock 82  335  20.8 

Blackfish 80  405  25. 3 

Redsnapper 78.5  410  25.6 

Brook  trout 78  445  27.8 

Black  bass 77  455  28.4 

Halibut 75  565  35.3 

Cisco 74  630  39.4 

Mackerel 73  645  40. 3 

Eels 72  730  45.6 

Shad 71  750  46.9 

Lake  trout 71  765  47.8 

Butter  fish 70  800  50.0 

Turbot 71  885  55.3 

Salmon 65  950  59.4 


PRESERVED   FISH 

Fish  is,  in  general,  so  watery  that  it  is  much  altered  by  either  salting  or 

smoking.     Common  salt  may  reach  ten  or  twenty  per  cent.  In  canning 
vegetable  oils  are  often  added. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water           each  pound  each  ounce 

Smoked  haddock 73                  440  27.5 

Salt  cod 54                   450  28. 1 

Canned  salmon 64                   915  57.2 

Smoked  halibut 50                  1020  63.8 

Canned  sardines 52                  1260  78.8 

Salt  mackerel 42                 1345  84. 1 

Smoked  herring 35                 1355  84.7 


APPENDIX 


177 


FOR   COMPUTING   THE   RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 

Calories  of 

energy 

Per  cent  of 

in  each 

pound 

in  each  ounce 

total  energy 

contained  in 

contained 

in 

contained  in 

Proteins 

Fats 

Proteins 

Fats 

Proteins 

Fats 

265 

25 

16.6 

1.6 

91 

9 

280 

35 

17.5 

2.2 

89 

ii 

317 

8 

19.8 

•5 

98 

2 

308 

17 

19.25 

I.I 

95 

5 

322 

13 

20. 

.8 

96 

4 

350 

55 

21.9 

3-4 

»5 

H 

367 

43 

22.9 

2.7 

90 

10 

355 

90 

22.2 

5.6 

80 

20 

383 

72 

23.9 

4-5 

84 

16 

345 

220 

21.6 

13.7 

61 

39 

340 

290 

21.25 

18.1 

54 

46 

345 

300 

21.6 

18.7 

53 

47 

345 

385 

21.6 

24.1 

47 

53 

350 

400 

21.9 

25. 

47 

53 

330 

435 

20.6 

27.2 

43 

57 

335 

465 
610 

20.9 

17.2 

29.1 
38.1 

42 
31 

a 

410 

540 

25.6 

33-7 

43 

57 

43* 

8 

27. 

•5 

98 

2 

437 

13 

27.3 

.8 

97 

3 

410 

505 

25.6 

31.6 

45 

55 

385 

635 

24  i 

39-7 

3» 

62 

430 

830 

26.9 

Si-9 

34 

66 

39° 

955 

24.4 

59-7 

29 

7i 

680 

675 

42.5 

42.2 

50 

50 

178  APPENDIX 

FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

SHELL   FISH,  ETC. 

Several  of  these  contain  also  starch,  largely  the  glycogen  of  the  liver,  up 
to  nearly  five  per  cent.  This  is  here  lumped  in  with  the  other  non-nitro- 
genous nutrients  as  "  fats." 

Per  cent  of       Calories  in  Calories  in 
water           each  pound       each  ounce 

Frogs'  legs 84                    295  18.4 

Round  clams 86                   215  13.4 

Oysters 87                    235  14.7 

Long  clams 86                   240  15. 

Mussels 84                    285  17.8 

Scallops 80                  345  21.6 

Lobster 79                    390  24.4 

Hard  shell  crab 77                    415  25.9 

Green  turtle 80                   390  24.4 

Terrapin 75                   545  34.1 

EGGS 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water           each  pound  each  ounce 

Without  shell 74                   720  45. 

Shell  included 65                    635  39.7 

White  only 86                   250  15.6 

Yolk  only 50                 1705  106. 3 

One  egg,  70  to  100  calories 


APPENDIX  179 

FOR   COMPUTING   THE    RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 

Calories  of  energy 

Per  cent  of 

in  each  pound 

in  each  ounce 

total  energy 

contained  in 

contained  in 

contained  in 

Proteins            Fats 

Proteins            Fats 

Proteins           Fats 

285                 10 

17.8                 .6 

97                  3 

120               95 

7-5               5-9 

56                44 

115                    120 

7-2              7-5 

49               5* 

1  60                      80 

10.                5. 

67               33 

1  60                    125 

10.                 7.8 

56               44 

280                      65 

I7.S              4-1 

81               19 

3OO                      90 

18.75             5.6 

77                23 

315             100 

19.7              6.25 

76                24 

350          40 

21.9              2.5 

90               10 

390         155 

24.4              9.7 

72               28 

275 

245 
242 
300 


445 

39° 

8 

1405 


17.2 

'5-3 
15.1 
18.75 


27.8 
24.4 


o 
38 

97 
17 


62 

62 

83 


i8o  APPENDIX 

FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

MILK   AND   CREAM 

The  carbohydrate  of  milk  and  its  derivatives  is  milk  sugar,  but  certain 
tinned  milks  are  nearly  half  cane  sugar.  Koumiss  also  has  cane  sugar  up  to 
about  five  per  cent,  and  alcohol  up  to  one  per  cent. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water  each  pound  each  ounce 

Whey 93  125  7.8 

Buttermilk 91  165  10.4 

Skimmed  milk 90  170  10.6 

Koumiss 89  240  15. 

Whole  milk 87  325  20. 1 

Evaporated  milk,  unsweetened. ..        68  780  48.7 

Cream 74  910  56.9 

Condensed  milk,  sweetened 27  1520  95. 

CHEESE   AND    BUTTER 

Most  cheeses  lose  water  slowly  with  age,  commonly  to  the  amount  of 
two  or  three  per  cent.  Milk  sugar  and  lactic  acid  are  the  carbohydrates. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water  each  pound  each  ounce 

Cottage 72  510  31.9 

Brie 60  1210  75.6 

Skimmed  milk 46  1320  82.5 

Dutch 35  '435  89.7 

Neuchatel 50  1530  95.6 

Roquefort 39  1700  106.2 

American  full  cream 34  *95°  121.9 

Swiss 31  2010  125.6 

Cheddar 27  2145  134. 

Butter II  3605  225.2 


APPENDIX  181 

FOR   COMPUTING   THE   RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 

Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 

Per  cent  of 
total  energy 

contained 

in 

contained  in 

contained  in 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

19 

13 

93 

1.2 

.8 

5.8 

15 

10 

75 

56 

21 

89 

3-5 

i-3 

5.6 

34 

13 

53 

63 

13 

95 

3-9 

.8 

5-9 

37 

7 

56 

5* 

89 

IOO 

3-2 

5.6 

6.2 

22 

37 

41 

61 

169 

93 

3.8 

10.5 

5-8 

19 

5* 

29 

179 

39* 

208 

II.  2 

24.5 

13- 

23 

50 

27 

46 

781 

84 

2.9 

48.7 

5-» 

5 

86 

9 

164 

350 

1006 

10.3 

21.9 

62.8 

ii 

*3 

66 

389 

42 

80 

24.3 

2.6 

5- 

76 

8 

16 

296 

886 

26 

I8.5 

55-4 

1.6 

*5 

73 

2 

586 

692 

4i 

36.6 

43-* 

2.6 

44 

53 

3 

690 

747 

43.1 

46.6 

- 

48 

5* 

- 

348 

1156 

28 

21.7 

72.2 

i-7 

*3 

75 

2 

420 

i*45 

33 

26.2 

77-9 

2.1 

*5 

73 

2 

482 

1422 

45 

30.1 

89. 

2.8 

*5 

73 

2 

5*3 

H73 

*4 

32.1 

92. 

i-5 

26 

73 

I 

515 

J553 

76 

32.1 

97- 

4.8 

*3 

73 

4 

19   3587 


1.2      224. 


0.5        99.5  - 


182  APPENDIX 

FOR    COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

FLOURS  AND   MEALS 

Nearly  all  vegetable  foods  contain  one  or  two  per  cent  of  mineral  matter. 
Many  of  them  have  also  one  or  two  per  cent  of  crude  fiber  which  is  not 
digestible. 

The  carbohydrates  of  the  grains  are  largely  starch.  With  this  is  included 
the  fiber,  and  one  or  two  per  cent  of  dextrin  and  various  sugars. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water  each  pound  each  ounce 

Barley  meal  and  flour 12  1640              102.5 

Buckwheat  flour 14  1620              101.2 

Corn  meal 12.5  I^S5              IO3-4 

Hominy 12  1650              103.2 

Oatmeal 7  1860              116,2 

Oat  preparations,  breakfast  foods.  .  8  1850  115.6 

Rice 12  1630  101.9 

Rye  flour 13  1630  102. 

Wheat  flour,  white 12  1650  103.1 

Graham  flour II  1670  104.4 

Entire   wheat  flour II  1675  104.8 

Wheat      preparations,      breakfast 

foods,  etc 10  1700  106.2 

Macaroni,  spaghetti,  noodles,  etc. .  n  1660  103.7 

Sago 12  1635  102.2 

Infants'  foods,  invalids'  foods, 
malted  milk,  and  the  like,  are 
all  pretty  much  the  same  thing 
and  average 6  1795  II2.2 


APPENDIX  183 

FOR  COMPUTING  THE   RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 

Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 

Per  cent  of 
total  energy 

contained 

in 

contained  in 

contained  in 

Proteins 

Fats 

Starch 

Proteins 

Fats 

Starch 

Proteins 

Fats 

Starch 

'95 

93 

135* 

12.2 

5.8 

84.4 

12 

6 

82 

119 

5' 

1450 

7-4 

3.2 

90.6 

7 

3 

90 

171 

80 

1404 

10.7 

5- 

87.7 

10 

5 

85 

155 

*5 

1470 

9-7 

1.6 

91.9 

9 

2 

89 

300 

3°4 

1256 

18.7 

19. 

78.5 

16 

16 

68 

3°7 

308 

1235 

19.2 

19.2 

77.2 

17 

17 

66 

149 

13 

1468 

9-3 

.8 

91.7 

9 

i 

90 

126 

38 

1466 

7-9 

2.4 

91.6 

8 

2 

90 

212 

42 

1396 

13-3 

2.6 

87.2 

*3 

3 

84 

247 

93 

1330 

15-4 

5.8 

83.1 

15 

6 

79 

157 

80 

1338 

16.1 

5- 

83.6 

'5 

5 

80 

225 

76 

1399 

14.1 

4-7 

87.4 

13 

5 

82 

205 

63 

1392 

12.8 

3-9 

87. 

12 

4 

84 

168 

i? 

1450 

10.5 

i.i 

90.6 

10 

i 

89 

237       140     1418         14.8       8.7    88.7 


79 


1 84 


APPENDIX 


FOR    COMPUTING    TOTAL   RATION 

MUSHES,  GRUELS,  AND    COOKED   BREAKFAST    FOODS 

These  are  easily  computed  from  the  formula  of  the  dry  cereal  by  dividing 
the  percentages  of  proteins,  fats,  and  carbohydrates,  and  the  total  food  units, 
by  a  number  greater  by  one  than  the  number  of  parts  of  water  added  to  the 
dry  substance.  If,  for  example,  two  parts  of  water  are  added  to  one  of  the 
cereal,  all  quantities,  except  the  percentage  of  water,  are  divided  by  three, 
since  the  resulting  dish  is  only  one-third  strength.  The  following  are  given 
for  convenience. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in        Calories  in 
water  each  pound      each  ounce 

Oat  meal  water 96  70  4.4 

Oatmeal  milk  gruel 92  155  9.7 

Boiled  oatmeal 85  285  17.8 

Cream  of  wheat 84  285  17.8 

Hominy 80  380  23.8 

Boiled  rice 73  510  31.9 

Shredded  wheat  biscuit,  each  one 

ounce 10  1700  106.3 

All  the  innumerable  wheat  preparations  have  virtually  the  same  composi- 
tion as  shredded  wheat.  They  differ  from  common  wheat  flour  only  in  be- 
ing slightly  drier,  so  that,  with  two  per  cent  less  water,  they  have  a  total 
nutrition  of  fifty  more  calories  to  the  pound.  Cooked  with  one  part  of  the 
dry  cereal  to  five  parts  of  water,  they  all  become  virtually  identical  with 
oatmeal  and  cream  of  wheat  as  here  given.  The  rice  of  this  table  is  cooked 
with  the  least  possible  water,  so  that  grains  remain  separate.  As  more 
commonly  prepared,  it  is  about  like  wheat  and  oats. 


APPENDIX  185 

FOR   COMPUTING  THE   RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 

Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 

Per  cent  of 
total  energy 

contained 

in 

contained 

in 

contained  in 

Proteins 

Fats 

Starch 

Proteins 

Fats 

Starch 

Proteins 

Fats 

Starch 

'3 

4 

53 

.8 

•3 

3-3 

*9 

6 

75 

22 

'7 

116 

1.4 

i.i 

7.2 

14 

ii 

75 

5* 

21 

212 

3-2 

i-3 

13-3 

IS 

7 

75 

37 

13 

235 

2.3 

.8 

14.7 

13 

5 

82 

4i 

8 

33I 

2,6 

•5 

20.7 

ii 

2 

87 

5* 

4 

454 

3-a 

•  3 

28.4 

10 

I 

89 

225 

76 

U99 

14.1 

4-7 

87.5 

'3 

s 

82 

186  APPENDIX 

FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

VARIOUS    FORMS    OF   SUGAR 

All  these  are  virtually  sugar  or  sugar  and  water,  with  less  than  one  per 
cent  of  other  substances.  All  are  entirely  cane  sugar,  except  honey  and 
candy.  Honey  is  about  equal  parts  fruit  sugar  and  grape  sugar,  ;'.  e.,  levu- 
lose  and  glucose,  with  less  than  three  per  cent  cane  sugar.  Candies  are 
largely  cane  sugar,  with  ten  or  twenty  per  cent  of  other  sugars  mostly  glu- 
cose. Certain  kinds,  marshmallows,  caramels,  chocolate  creams,  for  exam- 
ple, are  sometimes  a  quarter  or  even  a  half  starch. 

Per  cent  of       Calories  in  Calories  in 

water  each  pound  each  ounce 

Molasses 25                   1290  80.6 

Maple  sirup 30                   1330  83.1 

Honey 1 8                   1 520  95. 

Maple  sugar. 13                   1540  96.25 

Brown  sugar 5                   1765  110.3 

Candy 4  1785  111.5 

White  sugar o  1860  116.2 

PREPARED    STARCH 
These  are  virtually  pure  starch  with  a  little  water. 

Per  cent  of  Calories  in  Calories  in 

water  each  pound  each  ounce 

Tapioca II  1650  103.1 

Manioca 10  1665  104. 

Cornstarch IO  1 675  104. 6 

Arrowroot a  1815  113.5 


APPENDIX  187 

FOR    COMPUTING    THE   RATION    BALANCE 


SUGAR  ONLY 


STARCH  ONLY 


i88  APPENDIX 

FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

BREAD   AND    CRACKERS 

The  composition  of  these  depends  less  on  the  kind  of  flour  than  on  the 
proportions  of  milk  and  water,  and  still  more  on  the  amount  of  shortening. 
Any  particular  recipe  is  easily  figured  from  the  ingredients.  The  following 
are  standard  sorts. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in         Calories  in 
water  each  pound        each  ounce 

Brown 44  1050  65.6 

Rye 36  1180  73.8 

Corn 40  1205  75.4 

Entire  wheat 38  1140  71.3 

Graham 36  1210  75.6 

White 35  1215  75.9 

One  slice  bread,  I J  ounces,  loo  calories 

Rolls 29  *395  87.1 

One  roll,  two  ounces,  175  calories 

Toast 24  1420  88.7 

Sugar  buns 30  ^45°  90.6 

Pretzels 10  1700  106.3 

Pilot  bread 9  1800  112.5 

One  pilot  cracker,  I J  ounces,  200  calories 

Soda  crackers 6  *925  1*0.3 

Zweiback 6  1970  1*3.1 

Saltines 6  2005  125.3 


APPENDIX  189 

FOR    COMPUTING   THE    RATION  BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 

Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 

Per  cent  of 
total  energy 

contained  in 

contained 

in 

contained 

in 

Proteins 

Fats 

Starch 

Proteins 

Fats 

Starch 

Proteins 

Fats 

Starch 

IOO 

76 

874 

6.3 

4-7 

54.6 

10 

7 

83 

167 

25 

988 

10.5 

1.6 

61.8 

14 

2 

84 

'47 

198 

860 

9.2 

12.4 

53.8 

12 

16 

72 

180 

38 

922 

2.4 

57-7 

16 

3 

81 

165 

76 

969 

10.3 

4-7 

60.6 

14 

6 

80 

171 

55 

989 

10.7 

3-4 

61.8 

H 

5 

Si 

166 

173 

1056 

10.4 

10.8 

65.9 

12 

12 

76 

214 

68 

1138 

13-3 

4.2 

71.2 

15 

5 

80 

'51 

291 

1008 

9-4 

18.2 

63.1 

IO 

20 

70 

180 

165 

1355 

10.3 

84-7 

II 

10 

79 

205 

212 

1383 

12.8 

13.2 

86.4 

II 

12 

77 

181 

384 

1360 

11.3 

24. 

85. 

9 

2O 

7i 

182 

4l8 

1370 

11.4 

26.1 

85.6 

9 

21 

70 

197 

S36 

1272 

12.3 

33-5 

79-4 

10 

26 

64 

igo  APPENDIX 


FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

CAKES   AND   COOKIES 


Per  cent  of  Calories  in  Calories  in 

water  each  pound  each  ounce 

Baker's  cake 31  1370  85.6 

Cream  pie 32  I5I5  94-7 

Chocolate  layer  cake 20  1650  103. 

Gingerbread 19  1670  104.4 

Lady  fingers 15  1685  105.3 

Frosted  cake 18  1695  IQ$-9 

Fruit  cake 17  1760  1 10. 

Spongecake 15  1795  112.2 

Ginger  snaps 6  1895  118.4 

Molasses  and  sugar  cookies 8  1910  XI9>4 

One  cookie,  one  dozen  to  the  pound,  1 60  calories 

Wafers 7  1985  124. 

Doughnuts 18  2000  125. 

One  doughnut,  two  ounces,  250  calories 

PUDDINGS   AND   PIES 

Per  cent  of  Calories  in  Calories  in 

water  each  pound  each  ounce 

Apple  tapioca  pudding 70  555  34-7 

Plain  tapioca  pudding 65  720  45. 

Indian  meal  pudding 60  815  50.9 

Rice  custard  pudding 60  825  51.5 

Custard  or  squash  pie 63  830  51.9 

Lemon  pie 47  1190        ,      74.4 

Apple  pie 43  1270  79.4 

Mince  pie 41  *335  83.4 

Raisin  pie 37  1410  88.1 


APPENDIX 


191 


FOR    COMPUTING    THE    RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 
contained  in 

Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 
contained  in 

Per  cent  of 
total  energy 
contained  in 

Starch- 

Starch- 

Starch- 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

117 

194 

l°59 

7-3 

12.  1 

66.2 

9 

H 

77 

82 

481 

952 

5-1 

3O.I 

59-5 

5 

32 

63 

"5 

342 

1191 

7.2 

21.4 

74-4 

7 

21 

72 

108 

380 

1182 

6.7 

23-7 

73-8 

6 

n 

71 

163 

211 

1311 

IO.2 

I3.2 

81.9 

10 

12 

78 

no 

380 

1205 

6.9 

^3-7 

75-3 

6 

23 

71 

no 

460 

1190 

6.9 

28.7 

74-4 

6 

26 

68 

117 

452 

1226 

7-3 

28.2 

76.6 

6 

*5 

69 

121 

362 

1412 

7.6 

22.6 

88.1 

6 

'9 

74 

I30 

409 

1371 

8.1 

25.6 

85.6 

7 

21 

72 

141 

489 

1355 

8.8 

3O.6 

84.7 

7 

*5 

68 

i*5 

887 

988 

7.8 

55-4 

61.8 

6 

44 

49 

6  4  545 

61  135  5*4 

I O2  202  511 

75  i 80  570 

78  266  486 

67  427  696 

58  414  798 

108  519  708 

56  476  878 


.4  .2  34.1 

3.8  8.4  32.8 
6.4  12.6  31.9 

4.7  II. 2  35.6 

4.9  16.6  30.4 

4.2  26.7  43.5 

3.6  25.9  49.9 

6.7  32.4  44.3 
3-5  29-7  54-9 


i 

8 

12 

9 
9 


i 

19 

*5 

22 
3* 


6  36 

4  33 

8  39 

4  34 


98 
73 
63 
69 

58 

58 
63 

53 
62 


192  APPENDIX 

FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

NUTS 


Per  cent  of         Calories  in     Calories  in 

water  each  pound     each  ounce 

Fresh  chestnuts 45  1125  70.3 

Dried  chestnuts 6  1875  1 17. 1 

Peanuts 9  2560  160. 

Peanut  butter 2  2825  176.6 

Fresh  cocoanut 14  2760  17^-5 

Prepared  cocoanut 4  3ia5  I95-3 

Almonds 5  3030  189.4 

Pine  nuts 5  3°4-O  I9°- 

Butternuts 4  3165  197.8 

Brazil  nuts 5  32*>5  a°4- 

Walnuts 3  3^8o  205. 

Pecans 3  3445  215.3 

Malted  nuts 3  2420  151.2 

Cocoa 5  2320  145. 

Chocolate 6  2860  178.7 


APPENDIX 


193 


FOR    COMPUTING   THE    RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 
contained  in 
Starch- 
Proteins    Fats    Sugars 
115       228        784 

Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 
contained  in 
Starch- 
Proteins    Fats      Sugars 
7.2        14.2      49. 

Per  cent  of 
total  energy 
contained  in 
Starch- 
Proteins    Fats    Sugars 

199 

295 

I38l 

12.4 

18.4 

86.3 

IO 

10 

7» 

480 

545 

1626 
1962 

454 
318 

30- 
34-1 

101.5 

122.6 

28.4 
19.9 

19 

67 

14 

106 

2135 

519 

6.6 

'33-4 

32.4 

117 

2422 

586 

7-3 

36.6 

4 

77 

19 

391 

2317 

322 

24.4 

144.9 

20.1 

13 

76 

II 

430 

2330 

280 

26.9 

17-5 

14 

77 

9 

5'9 

2581 

65 

32.4 

161.3 

16 

82 

2 

316 

2819 

130 

19.8 

176.1 

8*.  i 

IO 

86 

4 

309 

2672 

299 

19.3 

167. 

18.7 

9 

82 

9 

186 

2999 

260 

n.  6 

187.4 

16.3 

5 

87 

8 

440 

1165 

815 

27.5 

72.8 

50.9 

18 

48 

34 

400 

I22O 

700 

25. 

76.3 

43-7 

17 

53 

30 

240 

2056 

564 

15- 

128.5 

35-a 

8 

72 

20 

194  APPENDTX 

FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL    RATION 

FRESH    FRUITS 

The  carbohydrates  of  fruit  are  largely  grape  and  fruit  sugars ;  with  this 

there  are  various  fruit  acids  and  often  two  or  three  per  cent  of  fiber. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water           each  pound  each  ounce 

Watermelon 92.4                140  8.7 

Strawberries 90                    180  11.3 

Muskmelon 89                    185  n.6 

Peaches 89                    190  119 

Oranges 87                    240  15. 

Apricots 85                    270  16.9 

Apples 85                    290  1 8. 1 

Pears 84                    295  18.4 

Raspberries 84                    305  19.  i 

Cherries 8 1                    365  22.8 

Fresh  figs 79                    380  23.7 

Plums 78                   395  24.7 

Grapes 77                    450  28.1 

Bananas 75                   460  28.7 

One  large  apple  or  orange,  100  calories 

DRIED    FRUITS 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water           each  pound  each  ounce 

Apples 28                 1 350  84.4 

Prunes 22                  1400  87. 5 

Figs 19                 1475  92-2 

Currants 17                 1495  93-4 

Raisins 15                 1605  100. 

Dates 15                  1615,  101. 

Fruit  jellies 30                  1 320  82. 5 

Orange  marmalade 15                  1585  99. 

Ripe  olives 65                  1205  75.3 

Green  olives 58                  1400  87.5 

Olive  and  cottonseed  oil oo                 4*25  264. 1 


APPENDIX  195 

FOR   COMPUTING   THE    RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 
contained  in 

Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 
contained  in 

Per  cent  of 
total  energy 
contained  in 

Starch- 

Starch- 

Starch- 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

7 

8 

"5 

•4 

•5 

7.8 

5 

6 

89 

19 

*5 

136 

1.2 

i-7 

8.5 

10 

H 

76 

ii 

174 

•  7 

— 

10.9 

6 

— 

94 

*3 

4 

173 

.8 

•3 

10.8 

7 

2 

91 

15 

8 

217 

•9 

•5 

13.6 

6 

3 

90 

20 

_ 

250 

i-3 

_ 

15.6 

7 

_ 

93 

7 

21 

262 

-4 

i-3 

16.4 

2 

7 

91 

ii 

21 

263 

•7 

1-3 

16.4 

4 

7 

89 

28 

42 

^35 

.8 

2.6 

14.7 

9 

H 

77 

'9 

34 

312 

.2 

2.1 

19-5 

5 

10 

85 

28 

_ 

35* 

.8 

_ 

21.9 

7 

- 

92 

'9 

— 

375 

.2 

- 

*3-4 

5 

- 

95 

24 

68 

358 

•5 

4.2 

22.4 

5 

'5 

80 

24 

*5 

411 

•5 

1.6 

25.7 

5 

6 

89 

30 

93 

1227 

1.9 

5.8 

76.6 

2 

7 

91 

39 

1363 

2.4 

- 

85.2 

3 

- 

97 

80 

13 

1382 

5- 

.8 

86.3 

5 

i 

94 

45 

72 

1378 

2.8 

4-5 

86.2 

3 

5 

92 

48 

139 

1413 

3- 

8-7 

88.3 

3 

9 

88 

39 

118 

1458 

2.4 

7-4 

91.1 

2 

7 

9i 

20 

_ 

1300 

i-3 

_ 

81.2 

I 

_ 

99 

ii 

4 

1570 

•7 

.2 

98.1 

I 

- 

99 

32 

1093 

80 

2. 

68.3 

5- 

3 

90 

7 

20 

1165 

215 

i-3 

72.8 

13.4 

i 

83 

15 

-    4225 


-  264.1 


196  APPENDIX 

FOR    COMPUTING   TOTAL    RATION 

VEGETABLES 

The  carbohydrates  of  vegetables  are  largely  starch,  with  some  sugars  and 

commonly  one  to  three  per  cent  of  fiber.  Different  samples  differ  widely. 
The  following  are  averages. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water  each  pound  each  ounce 

Cucumbers 95  80  5. 

Celery 95  85  5.3 

Lettuce 95  90  5.6 

Asparagus 94  105  6. 6 

Rhubarb 94  105  6.6 

Tomatoes 94  105  6.6 

Spinach 92  no  6.9 

Pumpkin 93  120  7.5 

Radishes 92  135  8.4 

Cauliflower 92  140  8.7 

Cabbage 91  145  9. 1 

Turnips 90  185  11.6 

String  beans 89  195  12.2 

Mushroojns 88  210  13.1 

Carrots 88  210  13.1 

Squash 88  215  13.4 

Beets 87  215  13.4 

Onions 88  225  14.  i 

Dandelion  greens 81  285  17,8 

Artichokes 80  365  22. 8 

White  potatoes 78  385  24  I 

Green  corn 75  430        -        26.9 

Green  peas 75  465  29. 1 

Sweet  potatoes 70  570  35.6 

Lima  beans 68  570  35,6 

Dried  beans 13  1605  100. 3 

Dried  lentils 8  1620  101.5 

Dried  peas 10  1655  IO3-5 


APPENDIX  197 

FOR    COMPUTING   THE    RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 
contained  in 

Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 
contained  in 

Per  cent  of 
total  energy 
contained  in 

Starch- 

Starch- 

Starch- 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

Proteins 

Fats 

Sugars 

IS 

8 

57 

•9 

•5 

3-6 

'9 

ii 

70 

20 

4 

61 

1.2 

•3 

3.8 

*3 

5 

72 

22 

»3 

55 

M 

.8 

3-4 

24 

H 

62 

34 

9 

62 

2.1 

.6 

3-9 

32 

9 

59 

II 

3° 

64 

•7 

i-9 

4- 

10 

29 

61 

I? 

17 

7' 

i.i 

i.i 

4.4 

16 

1  6 

68 

39 

'3 

58 

2.4 

.8 

3.6 

35 

12 

53 

20 

5 

95 

1.2 

•3 

5-9 

'7 

4 

79 

24 

4 

107 

1-5 

•3 

6.7 

18 

3 

79 

33 

21 

86 

2.1 

i-3 

5-4 

24 

15 

61 

30 

13 

IO2 

1.9 

.8 

6.4 

21 

9 

70 

24 

9 

152 

i-5 

.6 

9-5 

13 

5 

82 

43 

13 

139 

2.7 

.8 

8.7 

22 

7 

71 

*5 

I? 

128 

4- 

i.i 

8. 

31 

8 

61 

20 

17 

173 

1.2 

i.i 

10.8 

IO 

8 

8* 

26 

21 

1  68 

1.6 

1  3 

10.5 

12 

10 

7« 

30 

4 

iSi 

1.9 

•3 

"•3 

I4 

2 

84 

3° 

13 

182 

J-9 

.8 

11.4 

13 

6 

81 

45 

42 

198 

2.8 

2.6 

12.4 

16 

15 

69 

48 

8 

3°9 

3- 

•5 

19.3 

'3 

2 

85 

4i 

4 

340 

2.6 

•3 

21.2 

ii 

I 

88 

58 

5 

367 

3.6 

•3 

22.9 

14 

I 

85 

130 

21 

3J4 

8.1 

'•3 

19.6 

28 

5 

67 

33 

3° 

5°7 

2.1 

1.8 

3'  7 

6 

5 

89 

132 

30 

408 

8-3 

1.8 

25.5 

23 

5 

72 

419 

76 

I  IIO 

26.2 

4-7 

69.5 

26 

5 

69 

478 

42 

IIOO 

30. 

2.6 

68.8 

29 

3 

68 

458 

42 

"55 

28.6 

2.6 

72.2 

28 

3 

69 

198 


,    APPENDIX 


FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL   RATION 

COOKED   VEGETABLES 

Certain  vegetables  take  up  water  when  boiled  and  lose  mineral  matter  and 
proteins  ;  others  cook  down  to  a  smaller  bulk.  The  change  is  not  great, 
and  is  usually  masked  by  the  addition  of  butter  before  serving.  The  follow- 
ing are  sufficiently  standardized  to  be  worth  quoting. 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in  Calories  in 

water  each  pound  each  ounce 

Boiled  or  steamed  potatoes 76                    440  27.5 

Mashed  and  creamed  potatoes ....       75                     505  31.6 

Potato  cakes 74                    515  32.2 

Baked  potatoes 73                     525  32.7 

Baked  beans 69                     600  37-5 

Fried  vegetables  lose  water  and  take  up  fat.     An  extreme  case  is : 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in        Calories  in 
water          each  pound      each  ounce 
Potato  chips 2  2675  167.2 

Vegetable  soups  vary  widely  and  are  best  computed  from  the  ingredients. 
Examples  are: 

Per  cent  of      Calories  in        Calories  in 
water          each  pound      each  ounce 

Pea 87  240  15. 

Puree  of  vegetable 89  250  15.6 


APPENDIX  199 

FOR   COMPUTING    THE    RATION   BALANCE 


Calories  of  energy 
in  each  pound 
contained  in 
Starch- 

Calories  of  energy 
in  each  ounce 
contained  in 
Starch- 

Per  cent  of 
total  energy 
contained  in 
Starch- 

Proteins    Fats 

Sugars 

Proteins    Fats 

Sugars 

Proteina 

Fats  Sugars 

47 

4 

389 

2.9 

•3 

24.3 

ii 

I 

88 

48 

127 

330 

3- 

7-9 

20.  6 

10 

*5 

65 

48 

13* 

355 

3- 

8-3 

20.9 

9 

26 

65 

54 

6 

465 

3-4 

•4 

28.9 

ii 

i 

88 

128 

105 

367 

8. 

6.6 

22.9 

21 

18 

61 

126 

1680 

869 

7-9 

105. 

54-3 

5 

63 

32 

66 

34 

140 

4-1 

2.1 

8.8 

27 

H 

59 

39 

118 

93 

2.4 

7-4 

5.8 

16 

47 

37 

200  APPENDIX 

FOR   COMPUTING   TOTAL  RATION 

DRINKS 

Calories  in  Calories  in  one  glass 

one  pound  or  cup,  six  ounces 

Tea  and  coffee o 

Tea  with  milk  and  sugar 50 

Cereal  coffees 1 1 

Coffee  and  cereal  coffees  with  cream 

and  sugar loo 

Beef  tea 40  15 

Oatmeal  water 70  26 

Egg  water 75  a^ 

Whey 125  47 

Apple  juice 130  49 

Skimmed  milk 170  64 

Lemonade 180  67 

Beer 200  75 

Koumiss 240  90 

Milk 325  i" 

Cocoa,  one-half  milk 350  .                   130 

Grape  juice 380  142 

Chocolate,  all  milk 570  214 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Acids,  67-68,  73,  no. 
Aged,  work  and  ration  of,  40. 
Alcohol,  fuel  value,  43,  50. 

chemistry,  66-67,  80. 

as  food,  77,  81,  112. 

See  also  Beer. 
Alkaloids,  111-112. 
Americans,  diet,  20,  21,  51-52, 

99,  101,  126-127,  162. 
Amino-.  See  Amino-acids. 
Amino-acids,  89-97,  99,  102, 

106,  148,  149,  154. 
Animals,  food  of  lower,  23-24. 

store  surplus  as  fat,  47,  69-72. 

protein  supply  of,  88. 
Appetite,  55,  114. 
Athletes,  diet,  20,  26-28. 

matched  against  nurses,  27- 
28. 

protein  ration  of,  102-103. 
Atwater,  161. 

calorimeter,  34,  37. 

Bacon,  168. 

Balanced  diet,  115-130. 

Banting  diet,  140. 

Beans,  peas,  etc.,  21,  46,  60, 

196,  198. 
proteins,  95,  100. 
Beef,  164,  170,  172. 
Beef  tea,  44,  50,  200. 
Beer,  59,  61,  71,  112,  200. 
Bicycle  rider,  37. 


Blood,  nutrients,  58,  68,  71-72, 
77-78,  84. 

corpuscles,  83. 

proteins,  85,  92-94. 

poisons,  99. 

salts,  107. 
Body,  complexity  of,  82-84. 

as  chemical  machine,  5-9, 108. 
Bone,  15,  106-107. 
Brain,  no  special  food  for,  15, 
22-23. 

does  not  "work,"  40-41. 

complexity  of,  82. 

and  phosphorus,  109-110. 

as  food,  170. 
"Brain  restorers,"  in. 
Brain  workers,  diet,  15,  23,  IOI, 

103-104. 

Bread,  21,  26,  27,  28,  46,  114, 
188. 

cost,  60,  62. 

as  "fattening  food,"  71,  143. 

proteins,  93,  99. 

and  phosphates,  109-110. 

in  balanced  meals,  123-129. 
Breakfast     food.     See     cereal, 

grains. 

"Bulletin  28,"  48,  153,  162. 
Butter,  59,  61,  67,  73,  120,  121, 
180. 

Cakes  and  cookies,  190. 
Calorie,  35. 


204 


INDEX 


Calorimeter,  34. 
Candle,  work  of  burning,  50. 
Candy,  50,  63,  71,  186. 
Carbohydrates.      See    Starches 

and  sugars. 

Carbon  dioxid,  Lavoisier's  stud- 
ies on,  IO-H. 
as  measure  of  work,  34. 
as  end-product,  80. 
Cereals  and  breakfast  foods,  28, 

45,  63,  184. 

See  also  Grains. 

Cheese,  47,  62,  180. 

proteins,  85, 95, 100,  in,  120, 

121. 

Children,  73-74,  125,  131-13?, 
161. 

Chittenden,  29,  152. 
experiments  with  protein  ra- 
tion, 102-104. 

Chittenden  standard,  105,  118, 
119, 127,  128, 134, 161, 162. 

Chocolate  and  cocoa,  125,  192, 

200. 

Chowder,  44,  174. 
Coffee.  See  Tea  and  coffee. 
Condiments,  no. 
Corn,  59,  184,  188,  196. 

proteins,  94,  95,  119. 
Cornstarch,  186. 
Cost  of  Fletcher's  ration,  28. 

various  foods,  57-65. 

proteins,  97. 

Crackers,  59,  62-63,  *8& 
Cream,  45,  68,  180. 

Diabetes,  80-8 1. 
Diet.  See  Food. 
Digestion,  work  of,  36. 
loss  through  imperfect,  42. 


of  fat,  68,  72-74. 

starch  and  sugar,  76-77. 

meat,  77. 

proteins,  88-90. 

and  cooking,  155-156. 
Dog  fed  on  mutton,  72. 
Doughnuts,  190. 
Drinks,  200. 

Eggs,  26,  45,  50,  61,  109, 178. 

yolk  vs.  white,  62. 

proteins,  86,  95,  120. 
Egg  water,  200. 
Emotion,  work  involved  in,  41. 
Eskimo,  22,  73,  92,  115,  162. 
Essential  oils,  146-147. 
Extractives,  in,  146-147. 

Farmers,  37,  38. 
Fast,  tissue  consumption  dur- 
ing, 49,  162. 

duration  of  possible,  70. 
Fatigue,  effect  of,  on  work,  38. 
"Fattening  foods,"  71, 138-139. 
Fats  and  oils,  170. 

Liebig's  views  concerning,  12- 

15- 

fuel  value,  43-44,  70. 

in  various  foods,  45-48. 

cost  of  various,  58-61. 

chemistry,  66-67,  72>  75» 

in  body,  69-74,  77,  79>  88. 

in  diet,  73-74,  81,  115-118, 
135,  149,  162. 

See  also  Olive  oil. 
"Faulhorn  experiment,"  33. 
Fidgeting,  36,  40. 
Finance,   analogy  of  nutrition 

to,  79. 
Fish,  20,  45,  47,  176. 


INDEX 


205 


cost,  61-62. 

proteins,  95,  100,  no,  120. 

not  brain  food,  109. 
Fisher,  Prof.  Irving,  27,  29. 
Flesh-reducing   diets,    139-142. 
Fletcher,   Horace,    28,    31,   50, 

IO2,  131,  152. 

Flour,  46,  182. 

cost  of  foods  from,  60,  62-65. 
proteins,  119. 
See  also  Bread,  Grains. 
Food,  of  groups,  19-24,  101-105, 

116-118,  150-152,  162. 
individuals,   25-32,   102-104, 

161. 

animals,  23-24. 
"fuel"  and  "tissue-building," 

erroneous  views  concerning, 

12-17. 

qualities  and,  19-30. 
idiosyncrasy  in,  28-32,  161. 
loss  in  bodily  processes,  36,42. 
classes,  43-44. 
nutriment  of  various,  43-56, 

164-200. 

surplus  stored,  46-47,  70-71. 
cost,  57-65. 
fattening,  71,  138-139,  142- 

143- 

analogy  to  finance,  79. 
importance  of  non-nutritious, 

106-114. 
disease  and,  97-98,  108,  109, 

in. 

pure,  is  flavorless,  113-114. 
in  balanced  diet,  115-130. 
requirement,  table,  161. 
of  Americans,  20,  21,  51-52, 

99,  101,  126-127,  162. 
athletes,  20,  26-28,  102-103. 


brain  workers,   15,   23,    101, 

103-104. 
children,  73-74,  125,  131-13?, 

161. 

Eskimos,  22,  73,  92,  115,  162. 
Japanese,  20,  100,  115. 
laborers,  12,  21,  99-105,  116, 

152,  162. 

soldiers,  20,  101-103. 
special    classes,    55,    73-74, 

138-145. 

See    also    Heat,     Nutrition, 

Work;     Water,     Proteins, 

Fat,    etc.;    Meat,    Bread, 

Fruit,  etc.,  etc. 

Foods,   infant's   and   invalid's, 

188-189. 
Fowl,  47,  120,  172. 

See  also  Meat. 

Fruit,  45-47,  60,  63,  114,  194. 
in  special  diets,  20,  21,  26-28. 
proteins,  100,  120. 
See  also  Sugars. 
Fruit  acids,  67. 
"Fuel-foods,"  erroneous  views 

concerning,  12-15. 
Fuels,  relation  among,  66-68.    > 
Fuel  value,  30,  43-48. 
cost  of  foods  from  table  of, 
64-65. 

Gelatin,  45,  85,  170. 

proteins,  94. 
Glucose,  76. 

See  also  Sugar. 
Glycerine,  67,  68. 
Grains,  20,  21,  46,  47,  182. 

proteins  of  various,  94-95. 

See  also  Bread,  Cereal,  Flour, 
Oats,  etc. 


206 


INDEX 


Ham,  168,  172. 
Heartbeat,  work  of,  8,  36. 

and  blood  salts,  107. 

of  infants,  131. 

Heat,  early  theory  of  bodily, 
4-5,  lo-ii. 

of  muscular  work,  36. 

from  proteins,  91-92. 

from  alcohol,  112. 

See  also  Fuel  value,   Nutri- 
tion, Work. 
Hindoo,  20,  92,  162. 
Hominy,  184. 
"Hunger  squad,"  Prof.  Chitten- 

den's,  102-104. 
Hydrocarbons,  66. 

Infant's    and    invalid's    foods, 

in,  182. 

Irish,  diet  of,  20,  99. 
Iron,  107,  109. 

Jam,  jelly,  marmalade,  47,  124, 

126,  194. 

Japanese,  20,  100,  115. 
Judgment  and  appetite,  test  of 

food,  55. 

Kidneys,  as  organ,  78,  99. 
as  food,  170. 

Laborers,  12,  21,  37-38,  99-105, 

116,  152,  162. 
Lamb,  168,  172. 
Lard,  20,  32,  60,  170. 
Lavoisier,  lo-n,  34. 
Liebig,  theory  of  nutrition,  10- 

18,  33- 

Liver,  as  organ,  78, 80, 90, 99, 109. 
as  food,  170. 


Lumbermen,  116,  162. 
Lungs,  80. 

Malted  milk,  IQ2. 
Marmalade.  See  Jam,  etc. 
Massachusetts  General  Hospi- 
tal, lunch  at,  62. 
Meals,     specimen,     computed, 

51-54,  123-129. 
Meat,  21,  22,  45,  47-48,  50,  77, 

92,  98,  164-174. 
Liebig's  theory,  12-15. 
cost,  58-61,  65. 
replaced  by  gelatin,  94. 
proteins,    95,    100,    120-122, 

128-129. 

iron  etc.  in,  108-109. 
See  also  Fats,  Proteins,  Sugar 

and  Starch. 
Mental  and  moral  qualities,  diet 

and,  21-23. 

Miles,  Eustace,  28,  31. 
Milk,  28,  32,  45,  61,  125,  162, 

1 80,  200. 

proteins,  85,  86,  88,  95,  99, 

134-136. 
iron,  109. 
Motor-car,  likeness  of  body  to, 

6-9,  13,  17,  35- 
Muscle,     Liebig's     views,     12- 

15- 

nutrition,  14-15,  5$,  69,  70, 
72,  77,  78,  80,  103. 

proteins,  85,  86,  120. 
Mushrooms,  59,  196. 
Mutton,  1 68,  170,  172. 

Nurses  and  athletes,  27-28. 
Nutrition,    theories    of,    3-18, 
IS3-I57. 


INDEX 


207 


See  also  Food,  Heat,  Proteins, 

Work,  etc. 
Nuts,  26,  31,  32,  46,  60,  62,  69, 

192. 
proteins,  100,  in,  120. 

Oats,  22,  26,  27,  32,  60,  182, 

184,  200. 

proteins,  100,  119. 
Oertel's  dietary,  141-142. 
Oil.  See  Fats  and  Oils,  Olive  Oil. 
Oleomargarine,  170. 
Olive  oil,  20,  32,  48,  59,  61,  69, 

73,  170,  194. 
Olives,  194. 
Omnivore,  man  as,  98,  116. 

Paris,  calories  in  food  of  inhabit- 
ants of,  38. 
Peas.  See  Beans. 
Phosphates,  106-107,  109. 
Pies  and  puddings,  190. 
Plants,  88. 
Pork,  1 68,  170,  172. 
Potatoes,  20,  21,  45,  71,  114, 
196,  198. 

cost,  59,  61. 

proteins,  95,  99-100,  119. 
Poultry.  See  Fowl,  Meat. 
Proteins,   in  body,    16,   84-98, 

_  136. 

in  diet,  32,  97-105,  118-130, 
133-136,  142-145,  I47-H8, 
155,  162. 

chemistry,  84-86,  89-93,  IO7- 

source,  88. 

waste  products,  90-91,  97-99, 
iio-m,  148. 

and  sugar,  90-92,  115. 

and  heat,  9 1-92,  112, 144-145. 


storage,  96. 
Protoplasm,  and  fat,  69. 

and  proteins,  84-87,  96-97. 
Puddings  and  pies,  190. 

Races,  diet  of  various,  19-24. 
Raw  foods,   Karl   Mann   wins 

race  on,  26. 
Ready-to-eat    foods,    cost    of, 

62-64. 

Relaxing,  economy  in,  40. 
Restaurants,   cost  of  food   at, 

62,  64. 

Rice,  182,  184. 
Hindoo  and,  20,  92. 
proteins,  95,  100,  118. 
Rubner's   standard,  42,  49,  53, 

161. 

Salads,  113. 

Salts,  16,  43,  106-110,  154. 

Sausage,  1 68. 

Shackelton,   Sir   Ernest,   Polar 

diet,  32. 

Shell  fish,  45,  100,  178. 
Shoe,  etc.,  effect  of  ill-fitting,  39. 
Siven,  protein   minimum,   104, 

118,  134,  162. 
Soap,  67,  68. 
"Soft  drinks,"  44. 
Soldiers,  diet  of,  20,  101-103. 

experiments    with    marching 

German,  39. 

Soup,  44,  57,  112,  174,  198. 
Starches  and  sugars,  186. 

Liebig's  views,  12-15. 

in  foods,  43,  115-116. 

chemistry,  66-67,  7S~77>  §4, 
85. 

in  body,  77-81,  88,  170. 


208 


INDEX 


from  proteins,  90-92. 
in  plants,  46-47,  70-71. 
See  also  Sugar. 

Starvation,  early  theory  of,  5-6. 
tissue    consumption    during, 

49,70,  77,  115,  118,  162. 
protein  and  salt,  94,  97,  106. 
Stews,  174. 
Suet,  170. 
Sugar,  28,  32,  43,  47,  100,  144, 

186. 

cost,  60,  65. 

See  also  Candy,  Starches  and 
Sugars. 

Tables,— 

Rubner's    light-work    ration 

for  various  weights,  161. 
Per  cent  of  proteins  and  fats 

in  various  diets,  162. 
Nutrients  of  common  foods, 

162-200. 
Tallow,  50,  170. 
Tea   and  coffee,   44,  ill,   124, 

200. 

"Tissue-Building  foods,"   erro- 
neous views  concerning,  12- 

15- 

proteins  not  always,  92. 

United   States    Department   of 

Agriculture,  7,  18. 
"  Bulletin  28,"  48,  153,  162. 
Urea,  90. 

Vacation,  added  work  during, 

41. 
diet  of  person  on,  144. 


Veal,  166. 

Vegetable    products,    economy 

in,  59-60. 
Vegetables,   21,   27,   45-47,  50, 

61,  112-114,  196. 
proteins  in,  100,  119. 
vitamines  and  iron,  108-109. 
Vegetarians,  massacres  by,  22. 

athletic  feats,  26-28. 
Vegetarianism,  146-152. 
"Vital  force,"  4,  10. 
Vitamines,  108-109. 
Voit,  refutes  Liebig,  13-14. 
Voit    standard,    101,    104-105, 

116,  118-121, 127-128, 134, 

161,  162. 
Von   Noorden's   dietary,    140- 

141. 

Walking  feats  and  diet,  25-27. 
Water,  in  body,  16,  84. 

in  food,  16,  43-48,  57,  100, 

106,  114. 
Wheat,  182,  184. 

proteins  of,  93-95,  119. 
Work,  of  body,  4-6,  8,  33-41. 

and  food,  11-15,  42,  153,  161. 

women,  38. 

children,  37-38,  131-133. 

affected  by  conditions,  38-41. 

of  nervous  system,  40-41. 

of  emotion,  41. 

of  burning  candle,  etc.,  50. 

chemical  sources  of,  67-68. 

waste  in  using   proteins  for, 
91-92. 

See   also,    Food,  Heat,   Fuel 
value,  etc. 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U   .   S    .   A 


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